My best friend when I was in elementary school was Swedish and adopted by two parents who were born in Sweden. I'm sure I had that at their house..I do remember some God awful fish. There were a lot of other not so great foods but I always asked for and got kringla when I went there which actually is Norwegian,and also Fattigman cookies.Yum. Then,when we moved to Iowa decades later the teachers in the school where I taught always brought kringla in and to this day I still make it. It's so easy and the best thing in the world to have with coffee. There is a simpleness to Scandinavian cooking and sometimes it just hits the spot. Not that fish though..if it's the same thing I had.

I don't know if they are male or female. I googled it and attempted to find out but I'm still not real sure. My guess is they are both males. The new platy is a little bit bigger, but it's being picked on by the platy we already had. I kept the bigger platy in the net at the top of the tank overnight and just now let him out this a.m. And the smaller platy went right bak to chasing him around the tank. He doesn't quit either, continuously chasing it back and forth. This is just a 10 gallon tank. There aren't many decorations in it, but I could try rearranging them. He seems to chase him, wherever he's at. I don't have another tank to put one of them in. If this is going to happen with whatever fish I put in there, then I almost should get rid of the small, aggressive one, not the new one. What do you think?

I'm a firm believer in a flex/getaway room, but you have plenty of those. I agree that what this house needs is one large living area for the family to gather. If you are hoping for your children to grow up and for you to retire in this house, this plan is not the plan for a large family gathering! A couple of friends, kids, their spouses, a couple of grandkids, and that room is going to seem like a closet. (With three sons-in-law and 3 grandkids, I know of which I speak! :) ) Anyway, the back six feet of the room are dedicated to hall area, so you won't have any furniture there, and the opening to the other two walls have doors on them. This makes the family room about 13' X 15', which seems EXTREMELY small for a house this size. You will have to squeeze behind the chairs to walk into the "getting away" room and you will have to squeeze behind chairs to get out to the porch. Where else you would you put additional seating? It's a nice plan, and I like the upstairs, especially, but it doesn't seem suited to your purposes. If I were building a house to grow old in, I would want something more spacious than the study/bathroom on the first floor and certainly more closet space. Perhaps you could put more money into more square footage there, and finish out some of the rest of the house at a later time. Good luck! There's certainly a lot to be excited about in this plan. :)

Happened just today! DH and I were cleaning up the garage after emptying out a storage shed. Mostly it entailed moving fairly large pieces of furniture up to the second floor. "lift it up!", "lift WHAT up to where?", "lift your side UP", "you mean just up?", "I said UP! How is that complicated?!?", "up, & turn it to the wall, you mean?", "JUST LIFT IT UP!!!" ks toolgirl....were you there? listening? :-) only thing is....he sometimes doesn't even answer my questions....just does his thing and it is up to me to guess what we are doing. My usual refrain is ..."talk to me...tell me what we are doing". Really drives me crazy as I am a teacher and used to giving direction. A teacher he is NOT! lavender...now on to the subject! When we originally bought our home, we planned to build a garage. Even measured to be sure we could build the size garage we wanted and checked with city hall. We did not build the garage right away, took almost 8 years. But over that time we totally changed our ideas and built a garage that fit our home and time period (1800's)so much better than what we would have built originally. Also built it in a different location than we had originally planned. So we are very glad we didn't do that! (build the garage when we first moved in)