At the risk of letting on that I am an addict AND a thread hijacker...I have a related question... BananasDotOrg, you mentioned that on a plantation, they cut down the pups and leave them so that only the desired pseudostems will produce. When I have cut large pups, they just keep growing. I thought I read here about pouring kerosene into the cut to get that particular pseudostem to stop growing. (too strange to have imagined, right?) I wonder about keeping production up when I have so many pups. Ultimately, I also want to move this particular mat as it is blocking too much sun for my veggies. So I am transplanting pups when I can, but I need to get some of very large pseudostems under control. Can I use kerosene?

Well welcome to mystery land. I've cross pollenated my own Lilies before and gotten some real ugly looking things and some real nice ones. Most have been done before. The seeds can be removed and planted as soon as the pod starts to get "crunchy" or hard. This may require a daily check otherwise it may fall and split before you get them. Seems this happened on a windy night all too often to me so now I put a baggie around it. The seed color varies. I've had black, green, yellow and shades of those, however it doesn't seem to matter much if i'm a little too early or late. Mine have never bloomed the first year, may bloom some the 2nd and full size plants by the 4th year from seeds. There is no gaurantee the new color will stay that way thru coming generations. If you are trying to get a brand new variety like I am it seems very difficult. I thought I had one 9 years ago. I crossed a dark yellow with a Stargazer and got a Lily with a dark yellow base and a light pink brush with dark pink spots. It resembled "TOM PUCE" but with spots. After 3 generations of it I send it in and found someone had done it before. You can expect a surprise. I've planted the seeds inside (after 3 weeks in freezer) and let them grow all winter. And I've just let them lay on the ground all winter. They grow either way. Lilies are not very fussy about it. My current cross involves Lilium "NEGRE" (a very dark red) and "CASABLANCA". We'll see what I get. Take the seeds and plant a few in various ways just to be sure. GOOD LUCK to you. And you can name it LILIUM "MARBREE".

So if we were to do a 1.5 story with the master on the main level, where would you put that, behind the garage then? My thought process would be to first determine priority of room placement in the most ideal location for the use of the room and then if conflicts between room placement develop then rank by how much time is spent and how time is used for each room as well as the importance of that use compared to the importance of the uses for the other rooms. If watching the sunrise from your bed pays off with more enjoyment than having the sunrise and morning sun striking your kitchen, then plan accordingly. For instance, do you plan on using your master suite as a parental get-away from the kids, using it during the day or will your non-sleeping uses be restricted to evenings only, meaning that any views from the rooms would be lost to the darkness of the night? If the views are not important, I'd bury the master suite near the garage in the above sketch. If however, views and day time use are important, then I'd move the master to the east/south/west walls, perhaps right off the entry or in the back off of the kitchen. I'm not necessarily saying to put the master off the entry or off the kitchen, though you could, I'm just using these as examples that reference the above sketch. The way I'm designing my own home is to use a very self-reflective process which tries to understand how I actually live my life rather than trying to contort my lifestyle into architectural trends which presuppose how people SHOULD live their lives. So, to continue on the questioning, why exactly do you appreciate a main-floor master? Is it so that you can avoid stairs? Is it so that you can hear the comings and goings of the kids at night as they try to leave the house, is it because you don't want the kids too near your bedroom, is it because you don't want noise transmission from the master to be easily heard by the kids, and so on? Once you can articulate to yourself why you want something then you can find the best solution for your plan, rather than adopting a cookie-cutter approach. For instance, what I found amusing in some plans was a main floor master with a child's bedroom directly over it on the 2nd. Now, to me, if the goal was to reduce noise transmission from either the child's room to the parent's room or vice versa, the separation by floor, while having intuitive appeal, would fail to achieve the mission. The example I used in an earlier comment was to have a master suite separated by a stairway corridor AND a children's hallway which together create a 7'-8' dead zone, possibly with some walls other than the master and child's bedroom walls also added in between. There are no common walls shared, there is a huge dead zone in between and the goal of reducing noise transmission is, I believe, better served than a downstairs master with an upstairs child's bedroom directly over top, sharing common ceiling/floor as well as sound transmission paths down the walls. Of course, if sound transmission has nothing to do with the appeal of a downstairs master suite, then what I've sketched out is a solution to a problem which doesn't exist, or doesn't matter. I was thinking the master/office space on one side and then the kitchen, dining, great room on the other. That makes sense to me. Would you move the great room from the center of the house below to the front where the dining study is and move the study to where the great room is? Lots of configurations can make sense, but they must make sense in relation to how you envision yourself using the space and the particulars of your lifestyle and preferences. I'd say grab some graph paper, or even blank paper, and just block out the rooms and see how they interplay with each other, note how you foresee traffic patterns within and throughout the space, imagine daily routines taking place within the space. Once you have an idea of how you live, or how you want to live in the new space, then get the graph paper and try to get a better handle on size and furniture placement, and traffic patterns and by the end of this process you should have a very good understanding of how you want the space to be configured. I did the same for my house and this has resulted in me doing away with a formal living room from the now traditional LR/FR combo pack and reallocating the space elsewhere in the home, such as combining the entry with the LR space in order to create a larger sense of space/volume, has led me to create a larger kitchen than would be warranted in relation to the size of the informal living room, has led me to other design changes that likely violate what trained architects use as benchmarks for how homes should be designed. Thank you for the garage tip also - I thought 24x24 was rather large? We will be getting an oversize door for sure. I'd say measure your cars, block out a 24 x 24 space on your lawn, use cardboard boxes or something else to fill the space of your cars, then throw in the other junk you're likely to store alongside the walls of the garage, and see how much space you actually need. Try to get out of your car and see if the door bangs the wall or the other car. A 24 x 24 garage is actually pretty good considering that many designed give a 20 x 23 or something similarly ridiculous.

Whelp I got the project mostly done. I need better latches on the upper cabinet doors as the cat Abby has decided I put that there for her to open doors and climb up into. GGGGRRRRRR Both pieces were on wheels !!!! All furniture should be on wheels. LOL The old stuff has come from all over. I remember the hooser came from a liquor store in Challis. Just some thing they were selling on the side.Most of my stuff really is just junk. Yard sale stuff thrift store. I still need to fine tune things in studio and kitchen but already Hoosier is great where it is and the ability to easily get to the appliances is a big help. Not that getting them from a shelf below cabinet is all that hard. For me now it is. sigh. Good news is my hands are getting better. This has been pretty miserable. I am going to jazz up the hoosier a little bit. I am not at all concerned to devalue it as it is not a good one. Crappy wood not pretty oak. Painted and all. Then I will get a picture. Adding fru fru to the top is out of the question Again Abby has her own opinion on what belongs up there and has cleared it twice already of what she does not like. This dang cat is more like an Orangutan than a sweet little kitty.