Yeah, it's common property being right in the alley. That's why I tried calling the city to find if they would spray the invasive stuff. Before the development came in, the area on the other side of the alley where last house threw all their leafy stuff became full of ailanthus saplings and only there. At least when the developer did earthmoving, the trees were scraped off. I mentioned that the alley is mowed starting just past this deadend hump. Developer put in swale with a drain there which now catches all the junk plants. What was well kept and grassy is difficult to maintain as mowing crews don't do anything. Apparently I get to do that to. It's so frustrating.

Here is our story... We have owned a lot for the past six years, I worked in construction for eight years before going back to school and becoming a software engineer, i have been studying building costs ( http://www.nahb.org/generic.aspx?genericContentID=527 ) and the economy for the past nine years and was fairly confident that I knew what I was doing, I was wrong.... We started this March with a fairly large, house plan design shop (South Ogden Utah)...they do house plans online and custom plans. I would now be wary of any place that has aggressive marketing/overhead as they have to recoup this costs from their customers. I explained to them our budget (300K not including lot) after I had a copy of the initial concept plans I took to them to a my father in law's friend who is respected home builder, he said this plan is complicated and will be expensive to build, so we had them simplify the plans, but what we ended up with was something more complex and expensive to build...when the plans went to engineering the design place called and said that there were some problems that could be overcome but would cost more to build, I asked how much, they said call the engineer, engineer said 20K more, I said remove the feature to reduce costs, they put a large window in the middle of a set of stairs, that I caught at the end after their internal quality control review, Their solution was to delete the 6050 window, the problem was now the plan looks out of balance without a matching window..I had to come up with a solution of resizing and moving windows and gables around. When I started getting bids in May for our house I was quickly realizing that this house was going to cost at least 400K if not more...so I was quite dissapointed with my initial set of house plans. We started to think maybe we should bag the building a house and buy one but we own the lot and would take a loss if we sold that lot and we couldnt find any houses that fit our needs. So I found a small one man drafting shop whose father was a contractor and understands building costs a little more. At each step I stressed costs and had my new contractor friend review it....and we are now hoping to start building this fall...So life is full of lessons and I the big lesson, I thought I would be able to build the perfect house, what I realized is that that is not going to happen I will be able to build a nice house that I really like but not perfect..I also learned that once you get in the pipe (dig a hole, sign/pay house designer) there is no turning back and what you end up with in the end may not be exactly what you had in mind.

It would be very unlikely that you would be able to reuse marble tile that had been removed. However many people don't have the same tile on the shower floor as they do for the rest of the bathroom choice. It is solely an economic issues as to whether you want to save money by keeping the floor tile and getting complementary shower tile or whether you have a different aesthetic vision and are fine with spending the money to replace all of the tile.

I think part of it is having a pilot light on the cooktop and possibly a match-lit oven.