Milorganite does not keep the squirrels out of my newly dug beds. Around the cities you can get it even in most ACE hardware stores, and in any garden center worth its salt. But once the garlic is up they stay out. Run a few cloves through the blender and mix with water, and spray it out around what you to protect. It works as good as most other repellents. That is something the tiny interior cloves are actually good for. You can also dissolve garlic powder in water and spray that, but fresh garlic works better. For me the big problem is the squirrels who get every red ripe tomato before I get to pick them. Chicken wire cones protected the ripening fruit until the plants topped the chicken wire, when the squirrels just climbed the wire and picked the tomatoes right off the top. My problem with the squirrels is that neighbors (empty nesters) treat them like pets and hand feed the little ******. They are nice folks so I sorta grin and bear it with the squirrels or I would be trying to kill them off! We have cottontails around now but we never used to when there still were aging widows on the block who fed the stray cats, lots of them,too. They got the baby rabbits which is where your reduction needs to be in a metro area. In the country a good outside dog like a lab or a border collie and/or something along the line of 22/100 or 410/1000 is pretty efficient. Also wrap young tree trunks up to well higher than the snow line. Young tree bark, especially young fruit tree bark, is a bunny magnet in the winter.

I'm glad to know you guys don't like deglossers over sanding. I'm a professional decorative painter and always choose hand sanding on furniture pieces but have been tempted a few times to try a deglosser. I also agree that sanding and thoroughly cleaning trim in preparation is not a fun job, lol. A few years back I had a client who had a paint crew come on and put latex over oil painted trim...absolute disaster....ended in a lawsuit. I have pretty good luck with sanding and a bonding primer like 123 or C2... But a recently repainted a cabinet that had been done in oil and I did have some adhesion issues....I remember wishing I had just repainted the darn thing in oil. I believe one of the companies makes a non smelly oil based primer now, but I tried one and didn't care for the way it laid out...brush strokes. 123 levels out nicely, which is why I use that a lot. I would think using an oil based primer would be another way to eliminate sanding, though. Many of the oil primers say they can be topcoated with latex. Which always seems odd to me too! Maybe because they dry to a flatter sheen, gives the latex something to grip. I agree that the easiest thing is to thoroughly clean and repaint with oil like Ben Moore satin impervo, but aside for the yellowing factor, the op was considering a zero voc paint so oil is not gonna give you that....and the whole hassle of cleanup, of course. Oh, and when you see a primer that says it requires no sanding- ignore that. If you want to ENSURE latex sticks over oil, sand, and clean well. I was lazy painting over my own oil trim with 123 primer, and where I sanded it stuck well, and where I omitted the sanding, it didn't.

That picture looks pretty much identical to the Worm Factory in size and design, although I think it's a slightly different brand. It is very irresponsible of the public agency that provided it to give you only 150 worms and tell you it'd be ready to handle a household's waste in a few weeks! That is so outrageously inadequate! You need 1000 worms to properly start 1 tray of that type of bin. You *could* start with 150 worms in a bin that size and eventually get it fully populated - if you were willing to feed it a very, very, VERY small amount of food every few weeks or so, very gradually increasing for...maybe 18-20 months? And even then the waste of a household of 4 people would almost certainly be too much for it. I am a household of 1 who eats a lot of fruit & veg, and I have a Worm Factory that just about handles everything with four trays completely populated (it came with three and I bought and added a fourth). At full capacity, you would expect each tray to have about 1500-2000 worms in it. At this point, if I were you, I would try fluffing the bin contents even more and airing out aggressively, without letting the contents dry up all the way. I would pick out any visible chunks of rotting food but leave the original bedding. The coffee grounds can't be removed at this point but they should not cause further harm if they are mixed into plenty of additional fluffy bedding. You said you're adding cardboard, but not whether you're adding it in big chunks or fine shreds. Fine shreds are better if you can manage them - either paper or cardboard - to add a lot more air pockets throughout the material. You want things as fluffy as you can to soak up excess moisture. Finely shredded newspaper, torn up paper towels, etc. If you have some peat on hand that would be good to add. (Normally I don't advocate using peat as worm bedding - it's a waste of resources and shredded paper is perfectly good - but in an emergency peat might help, as it is extra-absorbent.) Make sure that any drainage that is running off into the bottom chamber is draining OUT of the spigot and not sitting there as a stinky pond. (I put extra dry bedding into the bottom drainage area to absorb extra moisture.) I'm hopeful that you still have a few live worms in there and that they'll hang on. If you can get more worms, try to do so, but in the meantime just keep things aerated and moderately moist. The bad smell should dissipate with airing. Moving the surviving worms to a new, smaller bin is also an option, but that would mean you'd have to find them all and pick them out. If there are worms still alive in there, keeping everything quiet for a while should allow them to recover.

Thanks everyone for the encouraging comments about the fireplace - maybe it's not so bad after all! Ha! Rugknots - you're probably right that I've gotten so used to it that I'm just thinking it looks dated. But we'll see what it looks like after the repainting. You've all got me thinking now about moving forward with getting rid of the entertainment center before I was really planning to! Perhaps I should really move THAT to Phase 1 and move the new furniture to Phase 2! Hmmm! tylerandabby - I never THOUGHT about taking off the side pieces! I know they are screwed into the main center piece (because I remember the RACKET the screwdriver made when the installer screwed them together!) But the top piece is connected to the bottom piece so I'm not sure I can take it apart. Something to investigate though. Thanks for the idea!