I'm in NY too. Mine are really slow to bloom this year. First we had the warm (hot) weather that hurried them along, and now the cool weather is slowing them down. I'm up on a hill, that stays cooler, so my neighbors have some blooming and I don't of the same established variety. I suspect it's just the cold keeping yours back. Also newly divided ones do tend to take longer to bloom. But when the neighbors iris are gone, yours won't be!

Why do [wall] ovens take so long to preheat? Because they are trying to heat 3.5 to 4.4 cubic feet of a very poor thermally conductive/susceptible material - air. Simple physics really. Are you looking for an oven to BEEP in 6 minutes? Or to preheat in 6 minutes? Most (not all) conventional ovens will beep at you in about 6 minutes. But neither your ovens nor Trailrunner's ovens are actually reaching 350 degrees in the center of the oven - where you're doing your baking - in 6 minutes. I'm sure they are most quite reliably recording 350degrees in 6 minutes centimeters from the broiler element where the sensor is located, however, that causes the oven to beep at you. ;-) Otherwise, I agree with Trailrunner - the smaller the cavity, the faster it will preheat. For frozen pizzas, a small toaster oven is not a bad thing to have. I think my cuisinart convection toaster oven is ugly as sin. But I've kept it and I use it regularly for heating and even cooking smaller quantities of food. Seriously no sense heating up a large cavity if you're not going to do justice to it. Good luck.

In 2015, people are now complaining about 4 hour cycles!! They must have degraded the motors and the detergents again. We are looking for a new dishwasher since our old one is severely clogged with deposits. We are using the SAME water source we have been using for 35 years. The big name detergent we been using has been stripped down until they it is terrible. Our glasses get coated with white mineral stuff that we have to use vinegar to remove it. The gray plastic racks are now white. This is new in the last few years. Also, the machine has started leaving food particles on everything. The glasses come out dirtier than they went in. I did a few tests and found out that two of the spray arms weren't spinning at all and the other one was barely moving. I took them off and all of them were loaded with chunks of white deposits that had clogged the spray nozzles. Vinegar barely did a thing. I had to grind them up by putting objects into the holes, but I couldn't get most of them out. Also, the screen on the bottom of the machine was almost totally clogged with a thin crust of white deposits. I scrubbed it over and over with vinegar and it finally started to break up. Bad move. Those little flakes ended up in the spray nozzles and clogged them worse. I can't get one of the nozzles to spin at all. Web searches have told me I have to disassemble the machine to get to the sump, which is probably also clogged. The top rack's cheap plastic wheels are so clogged with deposits that they barely turn anymore, causing the flimsy sliders to fall off the non-turning cheap plastic wheels they ride on. I have had to take these apart several times a week lately. Has anyone else had these experiences? We are throwing it out once we figure which of the 4-hour cycle, cheaply made $800 machines to buy.

Greendesigns, you had me with - "Of course, then there are the issues you find out during demolition and the mistakes that you the homeowner and your trades will make. The only surety that you can have for a remodel is that it will cost more and take longer than you think it will." ...but you lost me at the $500 over budget part. That would be truly funny if it were not painfully way too low. Try thousands upon thousands over budget. Of course, our reno involved more than a kitchen, but the overages were for many reasons. One of which was our gc trying to a la carte us to death. We had our master bedroom extended and yet he felt the need to charge extra, after contract, to re-set up the cable in the same bedroom. I can go one with many more examples, but that one illustrates well. Another reason is just about everyone who touched our job did something major wrong. The cabs were delivered shy 13 cabinets (big delay). Someone threw out the below the counter parts to our faucet. The architect drew our plans without going all the way into the stand up attic and assumed a whole section of the house had beams running in one direction when they went another way. The mistake was not figured out until our roof was ripped off, in Dec., no less. That lost us another month (and a lot of money). The sink leaked, the dw leaked, the icemaker leaked, the electricians screwed up the bathroom vent fan. They messed up the thermostat and heating (took weeks to sort out and still is not right). They installed the eyebrow window wrong and it took weeks of arguing and troubleshooting to try to rectify what was done. The cab installers made the island the wrong height and then damaged a cover panel. The counter guy mismeasured the island counters and had to remake them (6 month delay!). The gc's guys installed the vent for the kitchen in the wrong place, then at the wrong height, twice, and now it only functions as a light and I can bang my head on it if I am not careful. The house had rot in the sills which was discovered when the back of it was torn off. Our doors were delivered in the wrong sizes and one was warped. The flooring company sold me the wrong products so they ended up failing after installation and will be redone soon. Our propane line was installed to the wrong location so we got rejected on our c.o.s and can't hook up our stove yet (10 months and counting). To put it mildly, nothing went well the first try. If all had been done properly and professionally, it could have been done much sooner and with less stress and closer to budget. It seems like the good gcs are less prevalent based on speaking to others who renovate locally and gw these days.... In theory, a gc should make a project go smoother and faster.