LOL!! Me too Ricky! I just "DO" my garden all day long. Kate, when I was getting spinal injections and I had to remain perfectly calm and still even tho the injections burned and hurt, I would take a deep breath and recite flowers/plants alphabetically until they were done...the pain management Doc was alarmed the first time to hear me whispering, then he finally got used to me rattling off plant names. They actually kept it in my chart where I left off last injection visit. They would tell me prior to the shot...start with dischidia!! Right now I wake thinking about my tomato seedlings daily...and dream about 'em too! When something consumes you, just be glad it's gardening!

Same here with the frustration and depression to be moved in but not really "finished". And knowing that will actually take years since we did all the work ourselves and I'm totally burned out. And yet I've been doing this for a year now and I struggle to turn the "builder's brain" off. That being said, the SO proposed this spring when we moved in, so I've swapped "builder's brain" for "marriage planning" and suddenly I have a whole new hobby to keep me busy. I of course, feared that I was replacing one obsession with another and post-wedding would likely find myself doubly-depressed...only to realize that we're gung-ho to start our family so we're pretty much going to never stop and just be bored again in our lives. Which is kinda terrifying too.

Hi, I'm one of those people who HATES phone solicitors, but actually had a job doing it more years ago than I care to remember. Back then, we called numbers in sequence. The boss picked a prefix from the area and we 'cold called' every number from 0001 to 9999, then started on the next prefix. After many years passed, I got tired of people calling, and found it hard to be short with them, even though they were a waste of my time. I heard Clark Howard's radio show about every money con job, including phone solicitors. He said on a show that when someone calls you, if you tell them clearly, "Take my number off your list, and never call me again", that they had to remove you from the list. If they did call you again and you could show that they did, you could take them to small claims court and win a couple of thousand dollars. That seemed to work. As soon as I recognized a solicitor, I stopped them and repeated that mantra. We got less and less calls. Another thing that's important is to not give your phone number to anyone unless YOU decide they need it. Assume that anyone who gets your number will call it and try to sell you something, AND sell it to anyone who will pay for it. When we purchased an appliance at a major retailer and were told it would come in a few days later, they wanted all our info. When we refused to give them our number, they really didn't like it. Of course, they wanted the number to hound us to buy an extended warranty. Not giving your number out prevents untold numbers of callers from getting it. Don't let your kids give out your info at the mall or online for any reason. We never signed up for a 'do not call' list. This list can be purchased by almost anyone for a nominal fee. Remember, if you need to know who not to call, you need those numbers. If I needed 'hot' phone numbers, this is the first place I'd get them, knowing that they're current, and the odds of getting in trouble for calling them are on my side. There is no magic to cell phone numbers. I hear people in public answer their phones and say, you know this is a cell phone, as if that makes any difference to the person calling. Do sign the privacy forms at your banking institutions so they're not allowed to sell your information. That should stay in house. I'm sure that sometimes, major companies leak phone numbers and other info, but in this case, many more calls are received as a result of our own actions than from other's leaks. We turned our land line phone off over a year ago, which we were receiving NO soliciting on and don't get any on our cell phones. We got two calls on our cell phones that were a result of our car being repaired by two different repair places. One was a warranty repair at a dealer. When sales people call you, they know the longer you're on the phone, the more likely they'll get the sale. The sooner you stop them, the better. Repeat after me, TAKE MY NUMBER OFF YOUR LIST AND NEVER CALL ME AGAIN. It gets easier every time you do it. It works. Give the 555-5555 number to those who say they need your number, but you know they don't. Linda Here is a link that might be useful: Clark Howard-Money Guy Extrordinaire

Just to clarify: The entire value for your land, let alone your house, is what someone will pay for it. For insurance valuation you can look at replacement cost because it's about what you've lost that you can buy again at a store. As soon as you start using your stuff its individual market value (that is, what you could sell it on Craig's List for) goes down. That's why insurance for replacement value costs so much more than insurance for real value. The concept, if you sue someone for destroying your stuff, is to make you whole for what it's worth at the time it's destroyed. You might be able to argue that the durability of granite is such that it doesn't depreciate, but your appliances sure do! That's why people want to be insured to be able to replace what they lost as if it were new. No one wants to replace a fridge that was new out of the box two years ago with a two year old one on Craig's List that's been in someone else's house holding someone else's food, even though, technically, you already used up the first two years' worth of of value, and only lost a two year old, used fridge. For security against your loan, you're looking at market sale value only. The appraisal is what someone who really understands the market thinks you can reasonably get for it. It's more art than science, and the only way to know for sure is to actually sell. Since, of course, you don't want to sell, the trick might be to find an independent appraiser who thinks that your opinion about jalousies being not charming matches that of potential buyers for your house, and that seeing that they're gone will induce them to pay more for your place. The disintegrating and dangerous stuff you mentioned doesn't necessarily mean someone will pay more for the exact same house with those things fixed. It may be that there's a higher demand for a fixer "that we can put our own personalities into" than a place that's been fixed up already. Maybe there are 10 houses on the market with similar lots, houses, etc., 2 like your was, 5 with less destruction, but still ugly old tiles and jalousies, and 3 like yours improved with nice windows and no maintenance issues. If the ones like yours are priced at 20-30% more, do the buyers just choose the 5 in the middle? Do they actually pay less for the two at the bottom? Or does it turn out that they all sell for within $5K of each other? That's what the appraisers check. One of the two at the bottom might be at the top of that range, too, because it has a really cool tree, and one of the best three might go for the least because no one likes the granite in the kitchen. And that's how they get an average price for what your house is worth based on everything remotely like it, not just the ones that have had the maintenance and upgrades. Why do they sell the loans that way? So you'll buy them!!! They're into it for making money off of you, not to do you a favor. Banks are remarkably cold blooded institutions, and credit unions only seem nicer. Underneath they're just as cold blooded.