Hello again username 5 :-) My sympathies to you for the quack grass. I am sure you have heard the old saying....about changing what you can change and accepting what you can't and the wisdom to know the difference? Well...I agree with you that accepting quack grass is the wisdow to know the difference...lol. I am not sure I don't have it in the lawn, but if I do, I don't think it is everywhere. The one area I think it is in is adjacent to this vegetable area and I am not growing grass there anymore but installing a walkway with flat stones and creeping thymes between it. I am going to mulch that heavily before I do though and maybe let it sit there a whole season before I try laying stone. And I am going to plant the thyme very closely to get it to fill in fast. I am hoping that I may have killed 90% of it this year, in that area, because it has had cardboard and bark mulch covering it for three months and it has only rained twice in two months. I had another area of the yard, that I wanted to put a mulched sitting area in and I left clear plastic covering it for 2 years before we mulched it and put a sitting area there. We barely saw a weed for about 4 years after that, and just started getting them back this year, so we cardboard and bark mulched again and so far haven't had to weed this season. That area didn't have the quack grass in it though. I wanted to use the plastic technique for the quack grass but didn't want to injure the neighbor's trees. So my soil is close to ideal..hmmm...that is good to know. If I just had full sun and about an acre more of land..lol. This land used to be farmland in the 1940s. So I don't have to add lime to the soil for the veggies, right? I seem to do ok with the veggies. Last year was the worst due to horrible weather all season. Rain, cloudy, no breezes, humidity, heat..everything bad and nothing good. I got diseases on my tomatoes that I never got before. Thankfully this year was better. Even the dryness was ok for the tomatoes and peppers with supplemental watering. We also took out a 120 ft of overgrown shrubs along the lot line in the spring which really opened up the yard to air circulation. We planted new shrubs, but it will be awhile before they are that overcrowded. [g] I have one veggie bed near my back door that is on the other side of the yard. It is raised with cement blocks and instead of soil, I piled half finished compost and shredded leaves in it. I put in a couple of kale plants last spring and when it got hot, I pulled them except one that I wanted to leave to go to seed. After I collected the seed, I just left it there when I got busy. I had parsley in the bed too that I wanted to try to winter over. I put more shredded leaves around them and I was so happy to see that the parsley came back this year and has gone to seed. Love when it does that. The beneficial insects love the parsley flowers and I love the seed. The Kale plant, started growing again in the spring so I just left it, it flowered and went to seed again and I got busy again..lol .... and didn't pull it. I was so surprised to see it start growing again after it went to seed, and right now I have a kale plant producing very nice dark green leaves and it is filling up about a 4x4ft area of that bed. No covering either. We juice greens all year, so I am glad to have that plant with no work for it, right next to the back door. What is YMMV? [g] Okay well...you are right, nothing is written in stone. I may try using the lasagna bed technique and I can always add something else in another year if "disappearing" soil becomes a problem. Yes, I am growing all annual crops. How did you find the excavator that brought you in a truckload of soil? Sandy loam sounds great! I am not going to plant up that whole 35x35ft area with veggies. I am going to fill 4 raised beds that are 4x4ft. and I want to construct a structure to house compost and grow squashes and pumpkins etc up the structure. I will have a lot of just mulched area between the beds. WOW! Those silver maple roots are amazing~ ! I am SO sorry for all the trouble they have been to you. If we ever move, I am going to remember that. We had a neighbor 3 yards over just cut down every tree in his backyard. Why oh Why couldn't the people in the next yard do that?! LOL Oh, well, we aren't going to be moving anytime soon, so you are right, just have to make my peace with them. I thought maybe every fall, I should take a shovel and just push it into the ground around the perimeter of the beds to sever any small roots that are trying to get a foothold. I already found out first hand how they will go for anything raised. I have had them fill up a compost pile that I left too long, and have had them in my veggie beds over the years. What can you do...is right! Not very many people have the "perfect" growing environment. Everybody has something. Thanks so much for talking this all over with me. I am much more certain about what I need to do next year, and I can get started getting ready for next year, this fall. I rarely come to this forum. Especially this summer as I barely had a veggie garden. Had some plastic totes from Lowe's with 3 tomato plants, and a pepper plant. Two zuchinni and two eggplants in a bed in the ground...which btw was near that area that I mulched and was FULL of quack grass all season and nothing grew well. I didn't get one eggplant. The container plants grew much better. Two zuchinni were TOO much..lol. Next year, I have been told one is enough. ;-) Oh, btw, how much lawn do you have that has the quack grass in it? Have you tried that corn product that is supposed to suppress weeds? Adam

Hi - this thread is a little old now so this might be too late, but I have some related Qs even after reading all this helpful advice. I'm starting gut reno of a 120+ year old townhouse in NYC and plan to install 36" bluestar with 2, 22K BTU burners (in addition to other smaller burners of course) which we'll use primarily for stir fry. We HATE grease smell in the house and cook all the time, so want to get what we need for the stove we have. So I'm fine getting major CFM, if that's what it takes, but my concern is the ducting. It seems we have 2 options - up an existing chimney (which we're having relined and is not used for fireplaces; fireplaces were all sealed up decades ago) - but that would be 3 stories or about 50 feet needed to get to the roof and I wonder if that's too far for it to function properly...2nd option would be to bring it down into a soffit on the floor below (a rental apartment that already has a dropped ceiling) and vent out of the exterior wall, but this would require making a new hole in our masonry, and would mean the venting would be just outside our kitchen, under a french door that we're likely to want to open often while we're cooking - so the smoke could in theory end up back in the kitchen, no? I am by no means an expert so forgive me if I'm totally off base here, but any thoughts/advice would be much appreciated. Thanks!

Oceanna, I think many of those shows actually have very tight budgets - the real key is that the designers aren't personally invested in the space so it's a lot easier to buy something to stick on the wall - they don't have to live with it day in and day out like a homeowner would. Also some really junky stuff can look sumptuous on camera but tacky IRL. Although I do agree with you, Oceanna that some shows where the homeowner is paying for everything, some do have large budgets for art. Winker, you're in a tough spot. I would pull everything out and move things around to the rooms that you think they will work - keep moving things around until you have found some a "home". Consider storing the rest for a year or two and if you never use them, sell them. If you are brave, you can sell them right away to get that load off your shoulders. Tough love, sorry. If you have stuff you haven't used for two years - get rid of it now because it's likely you'll never use it. I know it's really hard sometimes to give this stuff up. I find TJ Maxx, Marshalls, Kirklands etc. are very dangerous stores so I usually avoid them like the plague or I'd find myself in the same trap you are in.

I love those cabinets (but not in that color!). For inspiration on painting that brick, look at subway tiled kitchens. Squint and pretend they are painted bricks. See? Looks good! Are you sure they're fake brick? Not that it really matters. It looks like a neat place--congratulations! I had cabinets just like that in my first house, but they were avocado green. I painted them white. I've missed them ever since. My counter had an ivy patterned Formica, so I didn't have the counter worry you do. (Hey you have a matching bifold door, already painted white!) But they do in fact look great in white. So, if you're keeping the counter, and why not, what about using white on the upper cabinets and a totally different color on the base cabs? Like a deep yellow or blue or well, you get the idea. The brick/backsplash area would then be a nice accent color, maybe. Were you going to keep the brick bricky? It isn't bad, and it looks good with more colors than you think. It ought to look good with yellows and tans. Cabinets are hard to paint (but worth it). Get that color right the first time. The brick, if painted, can't ever be brick again. But walls are easy. Go ahead and be daring.