Okay, first off, I don't know anything about plants. Clearly. My boyfriend's mom gave him bamboo a couple of years ago and now I have half of it while he's in Iraq. I had placed my houseplants outside once the weather got warmer outside here in DC and 2 days ago, I put the bamboo outside. It has grown at least 6 inches since I've had it (about 9 months) and I have it in a lot of water in a very tall glass vase. My problem is that last night when I came home, the bamboo was fine....but now it's turning white. Not yellow....totally white. I took it out and washed it in filtered water, removed some of the leaves, and put it in a clean vase with fresh water. Is there anything else I can do? Thanks!!!

I still have time to change this plan, and order a marble shelf to go in. How would this be done? The bottom tiles would be set, and then the shelf gets set on the top edge of the installed tiles. The top tiles then get cut to take into account the thickness of the stone and still keep alignment with the tiles on either side, and then they get installed. As for objecting to installing on top of the tile, yes and no. ANY kind of intrusion through the tile and waterproofing is cause for concern. But that can also be alleviated if it's "corked" back up with caulking. This one below, I'm showing you the unfinished pictures so you can see how it's done with the stone sitting on the tile's edges:

"Just wait until you have to pack up all that crap and move it." My SIL just bought a retirement home so they are decluttering their current house as a preparation for selling it--she keeps telling me she can't believe how much STUFF she's got to get rid of. When I go to their house I always admire how it looks nicely organized and without extraneous things all over. However, I also admire her tons of closets and storage space which she says leads to keeping, you guessed it, all that stuff LOL. I've decided I will play a mental game this summer and pretend we have to move; maybe that will be my motivation to get rid of much unnecessary and unused stuff in our house! I use the holidays and shopping for gifts to satisfy any yen I may have to be a retail hunter/gatherer. The past few years I increasingly feel as if I am gorging myself after staying on a careful and healthy diet; by the time January comes I feel so psychically bloated from all the shopping /buying that I need another year to rest up and recover! It's interesting to me to watch my young adult daughter who is setting up her first home. She loveslovesloves Home Goods, Marshalls, Pier 1 etc. And when I go with her I usually find stuff I could easily buy. I have a rule that I can't take anything from those places home the day I see it. That usually short circuits the purchase, I'm rarely motivated enough to fight the traffic and crowds to go back a second time!

Spoons. Often, people in 1700s didn’t own forks. Spoons were the eating implements and not easily replaced so they would be stored either on a hutch or a simple homemade shelf between meals. I have an inventory of an ancestor who died in 1784 and his inventory included “six putor spoons”. If you read that aloud, you will discover he owned “six pewter spoons”! From the sparse log cabin of the earliest settlers to the heyday of the excesses of Victorian times, spoons became a souvenir of a well traveled lady. My SIL’s grandmother left a large collection of little spoons with handles showing various tourist destinations. The handles would be elaborate scenes of Niagara Falls, Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower, etc. Your hutch is meant to be a replica of a New England piece and the spoons would have found their place there between meals because kitchens didn’t have drawers.