In answer to using old plush toys filled with soil? Why Not? Plants are rather adaptive and you will find something willing to take over and be cut back regularly, returning with a vengeance to cover that toy completely. I make topiary for a living and have used alot of drainage pipe for letters like a billboard I did in SF for garden.com that was completely planted with ficus vine for a years' contract. I secured the black plastic 4" tubing to the billboard forming letters along the way, forty feet up...filled with soil, made plant holes 1 per foot,covered in sphagnum moss secured with fishing line, made a solar powered drip system with 50 gallon drum water reservoir (remote location) pumped it 40' up, another pump for 40' across...The new disney retail headquarters in Pasadena, CA has an 18' Mickey Mouse Archway at the entrance...it has alot of spare space inside and is filled with refuse plastic. the plants dont mind as long as they have soil and water to grow in. The 15' ABSOLUT bottle I did in St Thomas has basically a teddy bear lining inside to hold plants and soils in, come to think of it. 3 months later the ficus vine had fully taken over, no doubt it did not hurt using grey water for conservation methods...dark green plants after that!

Depends on where you get the flour, if you grind it yourself from wheat that you get a good deal on, what else you put in it besides the usuals. I started making the recipe on the link. I make one batch just about every week. Freeze one loaf..keep the other out. I use Bob's Red Mill Organic White Flour 4.19/5lbs and bulk yeast I keep in the freezer from Costco. The bread I buy for the boys is by Franz (I think they are a "local" bakery though. Whole Grain White-No High Fructose Corn Syrup I buy it when it's $2 a loaf and stock up. They eat it or homemade bread now. I make these for hamburger buns, dinner rolls and sandwich rolls. Depends on size. I do the dough in my bread machine. Honey Wheat Sandwich Rolls I have made it in a big free form round 'loaf' for a layered "stuffed" sandwich and baked it in a bread pan. Tonight it was burger buns for turkey burgers. I use Organic White Whole Wheat and the above mentioned white flour. Delish Here is a link that might be useful: White bread thread

I forgot... I do have a few in progress photos. The one where one of our sons and I are standing next to the island was immediately after hubby had just made the waterfall cut and we were propping it up so he could see how it fit. LOL! That was such a nerve wracking day! LOL! We had paid all this extra money for walnut boards that were long enough to pull this off, and we couldn’t afford to mess it up. Hahahaha! The entire kitchen project took about a year total. Hubby worked entirely from our garage and driveway. He also took off an entire summer because he finished up two masters degrees, walked for them, went on a short term missions trip to Ghana, and one of our sons competes a lot for his sport (springboard/platform diving) and there’s a lot of travel for it, especially in summer as that’s the main competition season for him. But I was only entirely out of a functioning kitchen for two weeks (well, I used my laundry room and the grill out back during those two weeks) but I lived for quite a while without doors or drawers on my cabinetry... but my kitchen functioned during that time, which was important to me as we have five busy kids. The kitchen was an entire gut job though, we took down a part of a wall, moved a gas line, moved electrical, moved some plumbing just a little bit, added ventilation that didn’t even exist prior... it was a big job. The only thing hubby hired out was the fabrication and installation of our granite countertops. (Oh, and we paid for the 60” range to be installed because there’s no way to get into our house without navigating a staircase, and we didn’t want to wrestle that beast. We got a GREAT deal on that range though, it was a floor model and we got over half off on it and the hood... we couldn’t pass it up, and our neighborhood can support this kind of kitchen.) Actually, the cabinet around our fridge, hubby made that so the shelf comes out easily and the cabinet will eventually house a built in fridge like a subzero because that’s more expected in this area. We just haven’t found a great deal on one yet and that kitchen aid fridge won’t die, LOL! I included a before/after collage photo. People say “your kitchen before didn’t look bad,” but it was in horrible condition. The cabinetry was literally falling apart, and the layout was horrible to work in, we had no ventilation for the cooktop (and we do a lot of high heat cooking) and it was just miserable to work in because the layout was so difficult. My kitchen now is a dream to work in!

In my new home, I have a housekeeper come every other week. I like clean homes. I do NOT like the actual job of cleaning them. I'd rather work in the garden, or do some cooking, or deal with the chickens, or keep up with physical maintenance and house painting/staining, or do graphic arts or anything else. I'm fine with doing laundry, too. I clean up after myself in the kitchen, but the housekeeper does floors, bathrooms and general dusting/windows and such. And I now have a robot vacuum who is pretty decent at what he does. He even has a name: Sharkey. I'm not crazy about cleaning his filter, but it comes with the territory and lasts five minutes... I didn't have a housekeeper back at my old CT home. One reason my getting out of there and getting the place on the market is taking so long... especially since I then had a full time job that lasted well over the standard 40 hour work week. THIS one will be clean! But it doesn't need to be anally-House Beautiful clean. Simply lived in and tidy. My reasons for not wanting a fully white kitchen or other rooms are not about appearing clean, but about my just only wanting white as an accent. Aesthetically. That's what works for my sense of eye appeal.