Hi megmaine, WS is so much fun and you will love it!! This is the Canadian forum and it is fairly quiet. I see that you are in the States so I will direct you to the other WS forum that is far more active. (not that we aren't happy to have you here) and you are sure welcome to hang around, but your questions will get a much quicker response over there. To answer your question though, I put my containers under a small Japanese lilac tree that is outside my sunroom door. it provides dappled shade until mid afternoon when it becomes full shade from the shade of the house. Once the seeds sprout, you will remove the top of your containers so the heat shouldn't build up in the container anyway. I tend to keep my containers out of full sun because as I am at work I don't feel I can keep them monitored as far as moisture goes. As they grow, and if I am going to be home all day and can make sure they don't dry out, I may move some of the ones that have larger sprouts, out into the sun. once they have their second set of leaves, you can plant them out in the garden. Hope that gives you an idea of where to put your containers. click on the link below to go to the other WS forum. gg Here is a link that might be useful: WS

One more thing to consider is that getting a land-only loan can be difficult. First, there are not that many lenders who even make land-only loans and second those that do usually charge at least 2 to 3 percentage points MORE for a land-only loan than for a construction loan. In 2003, when DH and I decided we wanted to buy land where we would eventually build our dream home, we found a 4 acre lot we loved for just under $50K. Since our credit rating was impeccable and we were confident we could easily pay off the loan in 5 years, we didn't think financing would be any problem. However we discovered that if we wanted to purchase a $50K new car, we could have gotten a five-year new car loan for 2 percentage points LESS than the best five-year land-only loan available! We really wanted to go ahead and buy the land because it is a lovely piece of property, in a neighborhood that we loved, outside of the city but close enough to drive in easily, and because of an influx of people moving to our area, land prices were sky-rocketing and the number of available lots was shrinking quickly. But we didn't want to commit to building YET because we already owned one house that we were still paying for and we didn't want to wind up saddled with two mortgage payments if we couldn't sell the first house when the new one was ready to move in. But, it didn't seem right that a land loan would cost us 9% to 10% when we could have walked into any dealership in town, picked out a $50K new, and gotten immediately approved for a loan at about 7.5%. Didn't make sense to me at all! I even asked one banker why they would be willing to loan us the same amount of money for a brand new car that I could easily drive off the lot and totally wreck the next day leaving them with nothing to repossess for less than they would lend us the money to buy land that simply could NOT disappear. The banker had no answer other than "that's the way it is." So we did some creative thinking and ended up doing a cash-out refinance on our first home and essentially borrowing the equity we had built up in it to buy the land we wanted. (In other words, we sort of loaned the money to ourselves!) Because mortgage interest rates were lower at that time than our original mortgage rate had been we actually came out quite a bit ahead...even after paying the points on the refinance. As I recall, the mortgage refinace loan was at 5.3% and we had been paying something like 7.4%. Five years later we had paid off the first house completely and owned our land outright. Therefore we could use it's full value as equity to qualify for the construction loan we wanted. Plus, because we were no longer making house payments and had no rental expenses, we could qualify for a larger construction loan. Anyway, just thought you should be prepared. If you're hearing that 30 year fixed mortgages are costing around 4.25% and thinking that you ought to be able to get a land only loan for less - because, after all, you won't need 30 years to pay it off, think again!

I chopped the house off at the ankles and I increased the size of the windows from 10-20% and turned the front garage (I don't really know to do with that end exactly but the mini-peak matching the others isn't really right). I think a big problem with your drawn facade is that it is too tall and the windows too small to look like your inspiration. Your house is a "cartoon" of the inspiration in the sense that all the Symbols are there but they are tacked onto something with the wrong proportions. I am not saying that to me mean, but this is based on books I've read about how to see things (in order to be able to draw them) This makes some of the windows huge, but on a gothic, sometimes thats how they were. They might be too big, but I had to start by enlarging them in some proportion My friend lived in this "Gothic Cottage" on a riverfront. The house is immense really, the first floor ceilings are 14 feet, but the architect, William Strickland, played with the proportions to make it look like a small house. (Imagine that, compared to now where everybody wants things to look bigger). Even the upstairs windows are big but they are supposed to look like little cottage windows. The house is on a riverfront and when this was "country" the perspective from the river helped the illusion. The doors on the cobbled together enclosed porche are 7 feet. Compare them to the "windows" on the first floor of the historic part of the house. (The porch was an unfortunate enclosure in concrete block sometime in the 1950s)

Post more info. What are you wanting to do? This is a great place to discuss a renovation. But you need to give more info and pics are a plus too.