I compared the heating cost per BTU between GAS and electric. I found that electric was about two time more expensive compared to gas (cost about gas 0.86/therm, and elect 0.13/kwh). In colder night you can not afford to turn heat off! Your house water pipes may freeze and then plumber will cost you fortune! You need at least 60F at night to protect water pipes! If you have kids then be careful, they need good temp other wise doctors will get all your savings in one visit! Best way to save heat are, good attic, wall insulation, good windows. Have high efficiency furnace, have a 20K or 30K BTU gas space heater (for day only). Use electric mattress pad, keep sweaters on but set min 62F at night!

Hi. Thanks for the responses. To answer some of your questions.. The actual dimensions of the night table is 27"W; 15" Deep; 27" High. I would say that the top of the headboard of the bed in proportion to the night table is about 25" higher than the night table. Since the master bedroom has an overhead light, the lamp that I want to buy to place on the night table, will not be used for dressing, but more for reading while in bed. I am not sure if a lamp that is over 27"/28" in height would look to cluttered on the night table, but I agree with the comment that it has to be high enough to give off enough light while reading in bed. I just didn't want anything too imposing. Since I'm thinking of a candlestick type lamp (which is very thin), I suppose the area won't look too overpowering.

oceanna, Two words: reciprocating saw. :-) Move as much as you can into another room, cover everything else with dropcloths and/or old sheets, and have at it. We've had to take furniture out in pieces a few times. About 10 years ago we had an enormously-heavy sleeper loveseat from the 60s that DH and his two brothers somehow bent the space-time continuum to get up into our third-floor apartment (top floor of a mid-1800s three-flat), but there was NO way it was getting back down. We disassembled it with a crowbar and hammer and hucked the pieces out the window, which really confused the downstairs neighbors. :-) It was a pity that we had to render it unusable for someone else when I would rather have put it out on the curb as we lived in a very poor neighborhood and it would have been snatched up in a matter of minutes even in its worn-out state, but it had become pretty much unusable for us too and the apartment was far too small to blow that much space on something that couldn't be used - the living room was just barely big enough for one full-size futon couch (moved in and out disassembled), one chair, and a tv stand! That was it! Anyway, if you detach the plywood-box section from the headboard (and footboard if there is one), it is more likely that the headboard(/footboard) could be removed intact and reusable - if you post them on Craigslist, just specify that they are extremely heavy so people should be prepared to bring along help. Cut the plywood into smaller sections that can be moved, although a circular saw would probably be easier for that part. If you/your son aren't up to doing this yourself, hiring a handyman (through Craigslist? heehee) to do the cutting-up and lugging shouldn't be too awfully expensive especially if you don't go through one of those dreadful overpriced franchises. You'll have some cleaning to do in the bedroom but it's better than being stuck with furniture items you no longer like and cannot get rid of. I do know what you mean, BTW. Two houses ago we had a very large master bedroom (or at least very large to me, small compared to some folks'!) and purchased secondhand a 6 piece bedroom set, all pretty large pieces, which fit the room quite nicely. I got quite bored with the matchy-matchy thing and when we moved it did not fit at all into the new house's smaller bedrooms and couldn't really be divided up between rooms. A Craigslister got a nice bargain, since we just needed to get rid of these things that were crowding us out.

Thank you all for taking a look at this and commenting, aktillery, aprrilneverends, cawaps, caligirl, nosoccermom, schoolhouse, Open House, sunfeather, and nutsaboutplants. It's been pretty busy here and I've not taken the time to move the dressers around yet, but I do appreciate the comments. I too love symmetry, Open House, and I like the idea of wall sconces, sunfeather. We've done those in other bedrooms in the past. It was nice to not have lamps taking up space on the nightstands, but DH remembers it being a little more challenging to turn the lights on and off from bed, and something about their positioning made them prone to being knocked by our arms when we stretched in bed. Hmmmm... and then I have art and a mirror to hang on either side of the window... mocking this up in Paint as schoolhouse suggested is sounding like a good idea to see how everything might fit. And Caligirl, maybe your dream bed is hiding under a scratched brown finish on Craigslist. My eyes almost popped out when I saw the price of the Anthropologie bed, whoa! Thank you for the kind words, everyone. This is probably as close as I'll get to my dream of living in a barn. :-) I'm very thankful for DH's skills. It's been an interesting road to learn how to be patient about getting all the projects done. I used to be a lot more uptight about it (and can still have my moments...) I'm learning being uptight doesn't get the work done any faster, but can certainly make me feel anxious and miserable. It's been a slow adjustment to a mindset of being grateful for strides forward, recognizing that DH truly is getting done as much as he reasonably can, and that it's come a looong way from when we bought the house 4 years ago. The kids are growing up quickly, and we need to balance our project driven selves with being present and available to them, so things can take longer on that front, too. A while back I came across pictures from a Christmas in our last fixer upper when it was still in its "hovel" state. My aunt was visiting for the holiday, and I could tell in the photos that she and our kids were having a great time together. She didn't care that the house was a wreck. Her eyes were full of sparkle and laughter. She's gone now. (And that house with all the work we poured into it, and all the time I agonized over every little change we made to it, is gone, too.) I had forgotten much of the mess we were living in, but I remember well the wonderful time we had together that day, and that's what was important. In a few years we'll forget the discomfort of living with some undoneness, but I hope we'll have many good memories of spending our days loving and appreciating each other while in this home.