My brother & sil found this gift for me - she doesn't craft but loves to go to craft shows in their hometown and has found somed beautiful things to send me! Its a cake pan (sheet cake type) with a solid lid on it. On the lid, the lady had somehow put a lighthouse. It looks like she did it with some kind of dremel ? The whole design is done with tiny holes(hope this is making sense) She also has somehow engraved my whole name on the side of the pan so noone will forget who that pan belongs to if I take it somewhere for a dinner or something. Of course the top of the pan is hunter green just like my kitchen. Also sent me the cutest snowman made out of polymer clay with a bird on his head!! They really put a lot of thought into gifts they send us.

Softball, I see some good ideas for next year in your list. The kids gave us a digital picture frame for all our pictures from when we got married to now, 40 some years later. Can't remember what it is called. It plays them or freezes. Older DS loaded it so we could use it as soon as we opened it. I had forgotten some of those pictures. Gads, I looked thinner and better in my younger years! I wanted and received a screech owl house from younger DS. We live close to a preserve, and this area is over run with mice and rats. I wish I could have gone for a barn owl house for the rats, but they make too much nocturnal noise for us and the neighbors. This will help and be interesting to watch. DH gave me a new closet to be installed later. New shelves, rods, etc. by California Closets. We are not do it yourselfers and the builder's lousy rods and shelves are kaput.

About four or five years ago, I had a home designed by an architect, and he recommended a builder, whom I thought was wonderful . Unfortunately, the price came to $450,000, whether just the price the architect estimated, or when relying on that builder. And you just KNOW things will end up costing more. The location I was/am building in does NOT support a home priced at half a million, more or less -- we're really rural -- and I didn't want to spend that much at any rate. So... I hung back for a couple more years, and went with a log kit company. Between the log kit design modifications, and the builder's estimate, the price was estimated at $280,000 when I signed off last year. Due to extras I want, EITHER home would have ended up costing more -- I figure with these things my home will cost about $325,000 when done. (The square footage from both designs is about the same. Also, same property and same siting.) Two contractor/builders were recommended to me for what I intended now to do. (experience with log home construction in general, and more especially with the company supplying my own log home set-up). I went with the one who got back to me promptly and with interest towards this job. And he's been awesome. It's been slow, but a lot of this has been rural permitting issues where the folks who sign off on these things have limited working hours.

@CharlesRossHomes & @Virgil, Unfortunately there is little to hold people in residential construction accountable. There are a plethora of stories of architects designing structures well beyond client's stated or even stretched budgets. This happens when the plans are being developed independently for competitive bidding and when a specified builder is involved. Our first attempt came out 60% over our stated budget that the architect & builder had agreed to and our builder's detailed estimate was then 17% over the stretch number that they'd both asked us if we could do only 6 weeks prior. "I absolutely guarantee you that the contingency number is enough to cover all unexpected costs so you can absolutely rely on this estimate." This was obviously excepting changes that we made. Over and over we were assured that the estimate numbers and contingency were conservative enough that we could count on our builder's estimate. We are not even to to insulation yet and are already 5x that contingency. And that doesn't include $70k in concrete work for a terrace wall that kind of suddenly appeared without notification or discussion to us (and that will require another chunk of $'s for stone). The quality of work has so far been good though we have concerns with what we've seen so far from the insulation contractor. We are trying to be patient. We still believe that the end result will have been worth it. That said, we've no more money left so any cost overruns will mean having to reduce costs elsewhere. When the builder said that they'd now need to do Tyvek + Rainscreen we had to eliminate a couple of light fixtures that my wife really wanted and replace them with less expensive and less appealing fixtures. Hopefully once we move in those lessor-than-we'd-chosen fixtures will disappear in to the background and we'll be happy. But what else is coming? What other lighting fixtures will have to be downgraded because our builder's estimate was so inaccurate? How many bits of furniture will we have to notify our designer that we can no longer afford because of costs our builder didn't anticipate? How much of the landscaping plan will have to be reduced? Will we even be able to use our chosen landscaper or will we have to go with a lessor landscaper and lessor plan? ---------- The residential construction industry in the U.S. is getting an increasingly bad reputation. It's an industry that requires a great bit of trust and that trust seems to increasingly be violated.