Oh the deer do get hunted here, by this four-wheeled species. You probably have some hunting where you live as well :-) Seriously, the various hazards tend to take out the older deer here and I usually see young deer only. Once I had a big buck, he was browsing much higher than the smaller deer. I put up my activated sprinkler last night and noticed it went on at some point in the night. I'm going to be moving it around regularly, keeping the deer on their toes. I had a greenhouse water timer unit I put on it so it won't accidentally spray me during the day when there are no deer. Al, I have 1000' of 8' deer fence that I have been sitting on if things get too bad. Its a pain having the whole yard fenced in but I may be going there. I already have one side fenced, its the woods side that deer usually come from. Konrad, I wonder if the sound of the metal alone would scare them enough. I don't want to make too loud a sound but the metal falling would cause the ground to shake I bet. Scott

Hi Kaismom, Yes, that is not an oversight. At our lakehouse, every bedroom has a generous double closet and our master has a large walk in closet. One has games, one has outdoor furniture cushion, one has ski stuff, etc etc. None of them have clothes, except a sports jacket of DH's for special occasions. Our MO is that we keep our clothes there so that we never have to pack, and everything is in drawers or on hooks. We have luggage racks for guests. This is why ive put in so few closets. It's easy enough to add them in the future for resale, especially if we stage with fewer twin beds. The table I put in the kitchen is 40" wide and 9 feet long, we currently have it at the lake, and have squished 12 at it. I don't like the table, so I will be buying a new one anyway. I might go longer if we have to make the house deeper than 24' (based on what Virgil mentioned about stairs, a real possibility). I have to say though we both come from small families and we are the youngest so our kids are much younger then their cousins --- result no huge gatherings. We definitely want to make the porch big enough to eat. Right now it can where the corner of the porch is, but we will seek approval for a wider porch, too. We are told no bugs, and we didn't experience any when we were there in the summer. Being on a little point of land jutting into the ocean, i think wind keeps them away. Oh goodness, well, we can't shower in the ocean! I like guests as well as anyone but my primary purpose is not to provide free vacations to all comers. : )

I'm in CT. I used a medium gray plaster on a gunite shell, so the pool has a dark "pond water" type of look versus a bright blue water look. My pool (also 20x40) warms up quite nicely on sunshine alone. No solar cover, etc. Summer it stays in the high 80s, in a long hot spell it can turn to bath water in the low 90s. I do have a propane heater that can heat the pool and spa. I heat the spa, but haven't heated the pool since the kids went off to college. A 400k Raypak. I open the pool in April and close it in November. For heating the pool you'll want a 400k heater. Favorite simple things? I love the gray plaster and the dark subdued color of the water. I put turn tiles at each end of the pool for swimming laps. Dislike? The 3' wide ribbon of Kool Deck around the pool. I would have preferred to not have it and instead have stone coping, but for budget purposes I did the pool with the Kool Deck right away, as the kool deck was part of the pool package. Then the next year I installed the roughly 1800 sqft of stone patio, built and installed the 450' of cedar fence, and built the 16' by 40' pergola. Step by step. pool

My computer runs 24/7, less occasional reboots. I have it open the last pages I had open and I have several pages (TV logs, a couple weather pages, OneTab, email page and my "home page") pinned. I made my own start page with links to common places I go. This developed over the years. I added images for radar, weather forecasts, etc and has since grown to a large page. I often have a number of pages open. For instance when I go to some YouTube pages I wind up opening up others that are linked on that page. I open them in new tabs so I don't lose the other links of interest. Then close them down. If the computer locks up or something, it'll open the last set of pages and I can continue. One of the best things I did was spend the time making up a page of links. Now I tend to use OneTab more than the link page but it still has the old links and info on there so it gets used quite often. I never liked the bookmark/favorites setup on browsers. Works great for me.