Like carrie630, I check this forum continually, even though I tend to get swallowed up in "Lurkdom" for long periods of time. (Thank you Karen for pulling me out...) My other favorites are: Lilies...Gotta start sharing pics of my beauties on that forum Dahlias...Ditto above Annuals Gardening in Canada (only because climate/season-wise it's a little more similar to my world though still quite different) Far North---Though not nearly FAR enough...lol And I pop into other forums if I get a whim to try to grow something specific such as clematis or when I went through my daylily phase.

Srewolf, I spent a couple of weeks trekking across the Owen Stanley Ranges. From memory, found the M. ingens somewhere around the 1800 to 1500 metre ASL range. The locals said they were "Bush Bananas" and no good for eating. I managed some photos but it was difficult as the forest was a bit too dense. You couldn't get a large plant in the camera view finder. The giant Pandanus in that area was mindblowing as well, P. brosimos. If you google that some of my photos show up on internet forums. PNG is certainly different. I absolutely loved it. But there are dangerous parts to it, probably much the same as in the US. Some parts are absolutely great. I spent a bit of time in Madang (on the north coast) and the people are great and really friendly. You can wander around at night, the biggest danger is tripping as street lighting is very poor to non-existant and the footpaths and roads poorly maintained. Places like Port Moresby and Lae can be a bit dangerous if you go into the wrong areas. If you do go there you just need to check out about area you want to go to. The latest edition of Lonely Planet on PNG is really good.

Happy, It was indeed yours....how great you are for posting so quickly. I am so interested in what you will be doing with this wonderful building. One of reasons this intrigues me is I also built scale models of old/historical buildings. Your's would lend itself to this so easily. I love it in the current state and all the possibilities. The reason I lost your post was the building also reminded me of one of my favorite artists...Kim Jacobs. Realized that her paintings are also perfect for interior/exterior ideas with our smaller homes. Headed off to search for one of her paintings which has a "shed" similar to yours and some possible ideas relative to your questions. Cannot post any of her paintings due to copyright and there are limited works on the net. One of her paintings used door/windows for the entire shed. I have always wanted to attempt this concept (real size). Please continue to let us know how your "shed" evolves. It is a dream in the making. What does your home look like? There must be a great deal of history connected. Sandy

Beagles said exactly what I was thinking. To be honest, your old hand drawn sketch was too difficult for me to really understand. I knew what you were trying to do - figure out if it would work. To see if your concepts were sound. I get that. But I can also understand how the more technical-minded folks on GW would get annoyed when your responses were brushing off what they considered to be the bones of your project. I read most of your posts (here and on th other forums) and it always seemed like you were saying "eh, we'll figure out if the house is going to fall over later...but look at my pretty inspiration pictures". (if that wasn't what you were saying I apologize but that's the impression I got) Not knowing if the bones are good enough seemed to be the big stumbling block in the lines of communication. You want to know if it'll look right and everyone else is trying to ask if it's even possible. But now with the new plan sketch it's much clearer to me what you're trying to do (maybe it's the engineer in me). As far as your first floor layout, I like it but I would consider shrinking the opening to the living room on the front wall and move the hall/coat closet into that corner by the front door. So when you do have guests coming in they don't have to walk to the center of the house to get their jackets. Your clawfoot tub bathroom is nice but I think that if you moved the sink to the common wall with your master bath then you could maybe add a small linen closet where the sink is now. That way guests wouldn't have to go into your bedroom space to get extra TP or towels or anything. Just some thoughts. I have no idea what to tell you about the roof lines and outside view of the home without seeing what your mock up looks like. I'm not good at picturing things in my mind. And macybaby I have a picture of myself looking much the same except I was covered in plaster dust from our demo. We haven't gotten to the mudding stage yet, but I'm sure I'll be covered from head to toe again. We knew going into our kitchen renovation that the sunporch would have to come off and be rebuilt. There was essentially no structure. As soon as we took the trim off we could see that the corners were made from 2x4's in an L shape...we thought we might have load bearing windows. No headers back there at all. The only we saved was the roof. Luckily we didn't find any other major damage in the rest of the kitchen that we didn't anticipate. We're tearing out the floor down to the joists and even some of those are going to be repaired (sistering new joists to them to even out the floor)...but again, we knew to anticipate this before starting. Our kitchen budget was roughly $25k (not including a 5% contingency) and I think we're going to come in at $26k. I consider that a success. Of course we were hoping to come in closer to $15k but we did all of our investigation work a head of time and knew what kind of budget we needed to do it right. Of course I would've rather been thinking about paint colors and stain for the cabinets but I kind of figured, why waste my time and tease myself thinking about the pretty stuff if I didn't even know we could afford it. And the only reason our kitchen is getting done in the budget we have is because we're also doing all the work ourselves (with the help of some friends). All the demo, framing, flooring, electrical, plumbing, drywall...everything.