Thanks for all your insight. Marcolo, you have a great deal of wisdom which is well conveyed. Yes, we have old age and Yale (perhaps Cornell, my DH's alma mater) tuition covered. We spend plenty on our experiential splurges. Affording something is quite relative. I don't believe in legacy for grandchildren for moral and ethical reasons. The money should be plowed back into the society rather than create a class of aritocracy, as does Warren Buffet's belief. (I am sure my yearly salary is not even his hourly earnings.) I have had too much dealings with America's aristocracy (the legacy class) to see that it is not doing our society any good. My political musings aside.... We have a rental house. That kitchen will probably get done when the current tenants move out. My guess is that for that kitchen, the budget will be about 15K-20K. I think I need to do a midlevel remodel since the house is smack in the median price point for the region. I feel like I can make decisions for my rental in a few days and have a great looking kitchen that increased the function and form by huge leaps and bounds. I may even be able to increase the rent substantially. I will do Ikea cabinets, midlevel appliances such as Kitchenaid and probably extend the hard wood to the kitchen. On the other hand, I would never comtemplate putting in an integrated frig, attic mounted vent fan, quartz countertop, $3000 speed oven.. Forget it! Even with the budget limitations, I know that the kitchen can and will look great and function beautifully. I am actually really looking forward to doing it when the time comes. However, my own kitchen remodel has been difficult in terms of expectations and decision making. So the struggle really is how to say enough is enough and stop.... I think I have made the last splurge on my speed oven. Off to look for a cost effective faucet with great design without spending $1000! Anyone know of great alternative to Dornbracht faucets?

Thank you ladies!!! Yes, williamsem, I am going check out appliances forum, good suggest. Bahacca, I will gut the existing kitchen and move some appliances, all appliances will be new. Probably leave sink and dishwasher in same place. I really should take a picture of existing kitchen and figure out how to get it on here so you beautiful people can continue giving me great advice. Island will be situated so that there is flow room for new configuration. Catlover5, I hate bending over too, and I'm short! I can do it but that's part of why I liked the double slide in, that small stove on top!!! And the fact (rocketmom) that it's small (energy saving.) Christie327, if you loved yours so much, can you tell me specifically why you're changing to wall ovens? I'd like to have a small wall oven over a larger one. Do people do that? I really think I wouldn't mind the larger one being lower, as I hardly ever use it! That'd be more $$$ too. Ahhh! I'd like to put the cooktop (if that's the route I go) in the island but then I'd need a vent hood installed (I've been told the downdrafts don't really work) and I don't think I want a hood hanging down in the middle of my not very big kitchen. Thanks for hearing me vent about a vent!!!

You can make your money go twice as far if you learn some DIY skills, because you won't have to pay for labor. I'd suggest finding a set of used cabinets on your local CL and installing them. Golden oak are the most common, which isn't au courant, but will be better than diagonal fake-wood laminate. We just helped my DSS/DIL renovate a cheap old house, and they paid $400 for a set of cabinets that fit into their space (you have to get measurements of everything in the listing and then see if it fits), and just had to buy one upper and one pantry cabinet to fill it all in (golden oak cabinets are still in stock at the big box stores). They spray painted them with pewter spray paint (I had my doubts, but it turned out better than I expected) and will put stock laminate counters on them. Used appliances on CL as well (people are often selling whole packages of white/black as they're remodeling to SS). There may be some electrical or plumbing work, if you don't like the current layout.

Jennifer, It is crazy what the wind can do! I hate our windy March weather and always look forward to the calmer weather of April. Let's hope that we get calmer weather in April this year. Jen, There's a dog like that in every crowd, isn't there! I am laughing so hard, and I bet the doggy parents were too. We have had an occasional mud-loving dog too. Larry, I've lost my light shelf in the garage before, so it can be done. Luckily it was just behind and underneath a lot of junk and I dug it out. I hope you can find yours and don't have to build a new one. Nancy, I find zone 7 a bit harder than zone 8 even though we only moved 80 miles north....it is the way the cold nights just keep coming back after a relatively long period of warmer nights. I can look at our temperatures for this week and feel like I could put tomato plants in the ground by the end of the week, and it might work, but then April could arrive and bring back cold nights like it did last year. That's the hardest part for me....the huge inconsistencies in the weather. Then, there's those years we warm up really early and I love, love, love that because I can plant earlier with relative peace of mind, but.....a warm February and warm March usually mean a hot summer, so are they really a good sign after all? Oh, and microclimate is everything. They said we'd be 37 last night, then dropped it to 36....and, because our microclimate doesn't take orders from the NWS, our overnight low was 31 here at the house and 29 at our Mesonet station. So, I've learned I cannot trust the forecast either. It is maddening. I cannot even imagine the adjustments you'd had to make going from zone 3 to zone 7! My tomato plants had 4 hours of sunlight and very light wind yesterday and looked pretty darn happy by the time I brought them inside. So, today we're going to put them out for 5 hours after the chilly air warms up a bit. I keep putting off potting them up again even though I have all the supplies on hand and can do it. I really must do it tomorrow. I must. I'd start potting up today but Tim and I have a day of outdoor chores planned. On the other hand, this week is Spring Break and I'll have both the girls here with me, so I might be too busy playing with baby dolls with the little one and doing crafts and baking with the older one. I am trying to make the most of the time we have together here while they are staying with us because their new house is almost finished and they won't be here much longer. Unless, that is, my son has another day like yesterday.....you can skip the rest if you aren't interested in house mysteries because it isn't gardening-related. Their house is almost done, but you know, once you start poking around in an old house, there is no telling what you'll discover. Their house was redone in the 2005-06 time frame, and I'm not sure what all that involved but suspect it did involved total modernization that include putting up new drywall everywhere, which wouldn't have been easy in a house with 11' ceilings. I know it included a kitchen remodel with a sincere attempt to keep the old charm (successfully too) and new double-paned custom windows in the old Victorian style (very tall windows---about 7'-8' tall and thinner than modern day windows), and this probably also is when the central HVAC system was installed. However, there remains a huge attic fan that I cannot even describe (I'll try to on some boring rainy day) that likely dates back to the early days. While most of the house somewhat makes sense, the closet in the master bedroom has been a odd looking thing all along that I had believed was not always a closet. It does have drywall but had carpet whereas the rest of the house had hardwood except for tile in the kitchen and bathrooms. It also has an oddly-placed strip of border type wallpaper at about chair-rail height but nothing but painted drywall above and below, and the stupid border was a MLB one. In a closet. A closet with a mini-closet built in at the north end. So, with questions about the weird closet (honestly, big enough to have been nursery or a toddler's bedroom) in his mind, Chris went exploring. He pulled up the carpet intending to buy and lay hardwood if he could find a close match to the color of their existing flooring. Instead, he found the home's original hardwood from 1932, albeit covered in what looks like a gray paint. It sands off easily though, so he's going to restore the closet floors. I'm guessing that closet is maybe 5' wide and 12 to 14' long. Intrigued by the hardwood, he began peeling off the wallpaper border, but only drywall was beneath it. So, he then tore out the wall that separated the mini closet at the end of the big closet (after calling Tim and I to consult on whether it was load-bearing----which it was not). Anyhow, eventually he was sending us photos of shiplap walls, with tons of nails---some of which look handmade and likely date back to 1932. He found a beadboard ceiling--you know, the old original beadboard that was put up one skinny board at a time. After he kept sending us photos, we dropped the projects we were working on outdoors, carried in the tomato plants, and drove up there to see the stuff he was uncovering because by then we were just too curious about how it all looked in person. So, once we got there, it got really interesting. To get to the shiplap he had to remove very thick drywall that looks like it is 5/8" thick, and beneath that he found three separate layers of wallpaper---one obviously from the 1960s, one from around the late 1940s or early 1950s and one from the 1930s. There were layers of cheesecloth between each wallpaper layer, and the bottom wallpaper layer wasn't glued down...it was nailed down! My word! I never heard of that before. Would they have wallpapered a closet back then and didn't they have wallpaper paste? The other bedrooms have tiny closets more typical of that time frame, so we think that my original belief from the very first time we saw the house that the closet originally was a dressing room or a nursery probably is accurate, and the tiny closet within the closet was the original closet. In the north wall of that tiny closet, a large section of shiplap didn't match the other shiplap exactly and had been pieced in to fill what probably was an exterior window back in the day. So.....now that they have found the hidden history of that room buried there in the closet, they want to take down the rest of the drywall in the closet, stain it a walnut color, refinish the floors, turn 1/3 of it into a nice, neat closet for them with built-in shelving and clothing racks (they are minimalists and don't hang on to huge amounts of clothing that they don't wear....) and then turn the other half of the closet into a nice little office type nook with a desk and space for a computer and all that. I think this project will only take a week or so extra, but you know I'm laughing....because now they're already talking about 'someday' doing something in the other rooms, maybe exposing the beadboard ceilings or something. Oh, and the closet always had very old, very nice trim around the interior of the closet door, but it was flush with the drywall....so now we know why....they added the drywall and cut it to fit around the old, existing trim around the door. We had puzzled over why there was trim around the door on the interior of the closet. This is like being a house detective--figuring out what was done and when and how and why. That sort of project to uncover more of their home's hidden history will have to wait though because they don't intend to do it before they move in. The longer they work on the house, the more they fall in love with with its history. They had intended to remove and replace an old side door that leads out to the driveway at the back of the house, but when they discovered it was the original front door with the original hardware and huge, thick locks, they decided to keep it. It also has one of those old crystal doorknobs. (A neighboring home still has this exact same door as the front door, so they're guessing it was moved from the front to the side during an earlier remodeling.) Anyhow, another big project like this closet, squeezed in between their work days, gives us at least another week with them here in our house with us so we aren't complaining. I suspect that our house will be much too quiet once they move into theirs, and I think they'll love the little bit of history they've exposed in their oversized closet. See, this is why we are so far behind on everything at our house right now....because we drop our projects to go help with theirs, or just to go see what they're doing. I do know that the employee in the paint department at Lowe's knows Jana by sight now, knows just what colors of paint she keeps buying more of, and was totally thrown for a loop when Jana bought a new color yesterday....lol. While we were there, I did study the yard, which seems mostly dirt and weeds at this point. They wanted to know if they have enough sunshine to grow bermuda grass there, and I think they do, so we discussed the timing of planting it, seed vs. sod, etc. They have liriope on either side of their front walkway, a couple of sweetgum trees in the front yard, and maybe one in the back (but lots of shade from trees on adjacent properties), and one rose bush, so the yard does need some work and some shrubs planted and such. The ten year old spent much of her day raking up tons of autumn leaves, and I intend to go up there today and bring home those leaves for my compost pile if Tim and I finish up all our outdoor projects on time to do so today. Now, I need to go start the new week's garden talk..... Dawn