Diane, It's an economic shipping option that some companies use now for ground service. Both UPS and FedEx offer a version of it (Surepost is what UPS calls it and Smartpost is what FedEx calls it). They bring the package to your town, but the post office makes the final delivery to your door. Unfortunately, it makes it difficult to track once the post office receives it, and I've had several issues with delivery once it's in the post office's hands. It would not be my choice for shipping, but many times the consumer isn't offered the choice of regular ground service verses Surepost/Smartpost. I don't believe the around the country and back part of the shipment would have been the post office's fault on this one, though, unless they returned it to UPS as undeliverable, and UPS had to re-ship (I've had that happen several times even though my office parking lot connects to our post office's...they could literally toss it over the fence into my arms, yet the post office frequently sends it back as undeliverable due to an invalid address).

Lovely new space! Congrats. I think romans would be lovely in there - there are already so many wood elements I don't think texture or bamboo romans would "soften" the whole room - I see a pretty print with some color punches for the space If you keep them down to keep sun out in summer - I would rec getting insulated ones Plenty of places sell them here's 2 Country Curtians has excellent quality at reasonable prices and are very customer svc oriented + you can return at any time. - http://www.countrycurtains.com/index.jsp Smith & noble has lovely fabrics but there price points are way up there - you can request fabric swatches free to get a feel which I would recommend I'm going to attempt to make my own as I really didn't find the right size/fabric that worked for my application A couple of places to oogle over lovely fabrics my personal fav http://www.fabricguru.com/cart/index.php good luck Here is a link that might be useful: house of fabric

I somewhat agree. In general humans are where we are because we have the ability to pass on our knowledge to our children and therefore intellectually evolve. However, for some reason we are sentimental to the way our grandmothers cooked, surely influenced by their grandmothers before them. And so breaking kitchen myths might be somewhat of an emotional subject. In my case, I've never seen instructions to make stock from just bones; meat was always required. But then, my mother, good cook that she is, probably never made a homemade stock in her life so this notion didn't offend me. Therefore to me this experiment was more of a "No sht, Sherlock" moment for me, but now I see why it might not have been, for others.

Hi colorcrazy, thankfully, it's quite warm. We lost power a few weeks back for 14 hours, and the inside temperature dipped down to 7 celcius. When the power came back on, we were up to 15 celcius in less than two hours. All the walls have blown cellulose that was put in at some point. The kitchen is noticably the coldest room, probably because only one of it's three windows has a storm on it. I have some new pictures to share since I've last been around. Front window with it's fancy-ness: One of our upstairs originals: Our windows are double hung, but they do not have a weight and pulley system. They are simply held open by propping up the sash. The top sashes don't move right now because someone tacked in a block of wood preventing it. I'm not sure if that's how they were originally or not! I'm in the process of finishing up one of the spare bedrooms. The window you see above is in that room, and it is terribly, terribly rotten. I was vaccuuming out dead flies from between the window and the DIY permanent storm (insert eye roll here), and the vaccuum nozzle went right through the sill. Blech. All that's left to do in the room is the floor. And the window, but I'm ignoring it for now.