Pooh, i've never seen West Wing. Marda, i'd love to read the book by McCullough. I think Abigail had some health problems that might have kept her at home in Quincy a lot of the time. Also since they were the first family to move into the Executive Mansion on the new frontier in Washington, she found it to be primitive compared to her own home. They were devoted to each other and she was a great hostess. We must remember that back in the early years that the public was free to wander in and out of the Executive Mansion to meet and greet the President and First Lady.

Tropicalthought, Your Firefighter rose and your trees will do extremely well as a result of the rains. You're lucky you got them in the ground in the nick of time! The spider mites don't like all of this rain, so that's good too. Your mite problem will not get worse as a result of rain. All of your garden will do better if a full El Nino hits us. The rain will flush all of the alkaline salts out of the soil and the plants will be washed clean of most pests. Your trees will grow deep-rooted and be healthier as a result. California natives are adapted to El Nino shifts in weather, and they grow well in wet years here too. The poa annua- that's just such a hassle. I have it everywhere too. But it would grow even if there was very little rain, so you would be no better off. So cheer up, you'll be amazed at the growth you see this year! Renee

Kauorika, I am afraid I too am "not lovin it." In addition to the tight hallway you originally asked about, and the lack of enough aisleway space between the shower and sink in Bath 1 (that betaiota mentioned), I see the following issues: 1) The extraoridinarily thick exterior walls are eating up a fairly high percentage of your potential interior space. Are you really planning for the exterior walls to be 18 inches thick? And if so, why are they so thick? Are you building a straw bale house? 2) While your hallways aren't that long, because your house is so small, the hallways, foyer, and staircase take up way too much of your available floorspace. 3) I think you're going to find it hard to fit a full-sized bed and a dresser into the bedroom and still have room to easily move about to reach the closet. I only see two possible walls for the head of the bed to go against. Either it will have to be placed under the (#12) windows - assuming they are high enough - or it'll have to be placed against the wall directly across from those windows. In the first case, getting around the bed to reach the closet is going to require squeezing between the foot of the bed and that bumped in wall that you have because of the little hallway niche you created to provide access to the bathroom. In the second, it's gonna be a long walk around the bed every time you need to get to the closet. And, because the bathroom really needs to be made wider (to give you room to slip past the shower), the bedroom will have to be made smaller making this problem even worse. 4) I suspect you visualize a pretty little seating area in the "window bumpout" in the bedoom. A couple of comfy chairs, maybe a little round table? At 7.5 feet, the bumpout is just barely wide enough for that purpose but, depending on the direction that house faces, the windows on three sides could effectively create a little greenhouse and make the window bumpout area uncomfortably warm all the time. And, if you need to reduce the width of the bedroom to make the bath wider, your bed may crown any furniture you attempt to put in the window bump-out. 5) The dining room is just too small to accomodate anything more than maybe a tiny little four-seat round table. Remember, you need space all the way around your dining table for diners to get in and out of their chairs. And, because the only path from front entry to great room goes right thru the dining room, if the dining room is not wide enough, you'll constantly be having to duck around dining room chairs to get to the great room. 6) The pony wall/bar between kitchen and great room is a problem. The plans show that it is supposed to be 42" inches high as measured from the kitchen floor. Then the great room floor is dropped down from the kitchen floor level. If I'm reading the plans correctly, there are TWO steps down, with a 6" drop for each step. That means the great room floor is 12" lower than the kitchen floor. So, from the great room side, that pony wall is going to be 54" high! Now I'm fairly tall but a 54" high bar would be uncomfortably high even for me. And, it would be at chin height for my best friend. No way that is gonna work. 7) I see no possible way to arrange furniture in the "great room." You have a window seat on one wall. YOu have a kitchen bar and the step down entry on a second wall. YOu have the fireplace and built-in bookcases on the third wall. And you have a wall of windows and an inswinging patio door on the last wall. You have NO reasonably blank walls against which you can place a sofa or a couple of easy chairs. That means everything is going to have to "float" which would be fine EXCEPT that floating furniture arrangements take more space than arrangements where the furniture is pushed up against the walls. Here, your whole room (except for the window seat niche) is only about 12X15. By the time you leave space in front of the window seat niche for an aisleway from kitchen to that patio door, and leave space for barstools at the bar and aisleway space to reach them, and leave space in front of your bookcases so you can get to books shelved there - your available room for arranging furniture has shrunk to something like 9 ft x 12 ft. Possibly even smaller Awfully hard to fit a sofa and a couple of easy chairs into theat small a space. If you want an end table or two, or a coffee table, or an ottoman, you're totally sunk. Do yourself a BIG favor. Make some scaled cutouts to represent every piece of furniture you THINK you want to have in each of your rooms and see if you can make everything fit. And, remember that you need room to walk around and REACH each piece of furniture so be sure to build in aisleway spaces. sorry to be so negative but even without seeing the upstairs or the basement, my inclination would be to scrap this plan and start over fress. There are just too many issues on this one floor that cannot be addressed with via small tweaks (i.e., tweaks that don't require moving the staircase or any exteior walls.)

Its been a cooler than normal Spring here; the lilacs (which usually bloom around Mothers Day) just got started, about 10 days late. We even had a hard freeze last week for much of the North, as was mentioned here in a recent thread. That being said, don't despair. This thread started earlier in the month, when putting out warm-season crops for those in the North was risky (unless you are willing to protect them if necessary). My target date for planting warm-season vegetables tends to be around Memorial Day... the long-term forecast is for 70's (with thunderstorms), so the warm-up is arriving on schedule. I started planting yesterday; but I will be starting some beans indoors as backups, in case those in the ground get drowned out. Those bean transplants proved their worth last year, when torrential rains immediately following planting drowned out 1/2 of my direct-seeded beans (and most of my corn). There really is no such thing as a "normal year" here, the weather is too temperamental. I try to plant early when weather permits, but only if I have extra plants or seeds in case of failure.