Keirapham, I know you may have just accidentally overlooked the rules about not selling or advertising anything on Gardenweb, but there are rules against it. You may want to post your offer on some of the many sites that allow such posts. If you decide to offer your plants for free or for swap, you may want to check out the Plant Exchange Forum. This forum is reserved for discussion about growing fruit and operating orchards.

One way to handle putting an old self into a larger new kitchen is to draw a smaller old kitchen inside of it. All those things that used to live in the den? Or the basement? Or on the high shelves of the kids' closets? Those are still your least used things. It's great to be able to store them in the kitchen now, but you don't want to have the Christmas dishes and turkey roaster and martini glasses between you and the action. As much as you can, put the stuff you use the most away first, and do it in the tightest workflow area you can, best at point of use, designing your point of use at the closest comfortable place to the previous and next steps in the cooking process. If there's room leftover in your working path--like whole empty shelves or drawers, you can put in some of the least used stuff that makes sense in that location (roaster in the cooking zone, etc.) and put the rest of the overage in the more outlying areas, pantry, wherever isn't blocking you from using your kitchen efficiently. I think Buehl has winter dishes in her dish area because there was room (and she has a very efficient kitchen), but if you can tighten up your workspace by putting the Christmas china out, do it! And swap it in at Christmas time, if you use it all day for a month.

You sound so excited about your new home. I guess that makes it possible to get along w/o those appliances. It is fun setting up a new household. I know what you mean about having a front porch. We have one, even though it is very small, it is on the shady side of the house and we really enjoy it. Glad it is all going pretty well for you.

Foundry is a very thin product - their colors are great, but the corner pieces and shakes are not great. We've used 2 different vinyl shake products on different homes - one is no longer in business but we currently have Novik shakes on our garage/workshop and our house gable ends. We're happy with it and the corners are done well. Get the name of the rep for your area and ask for large samples so you can see colors - little chips are not enough to make that kind of decision.