I agree with the above, for example, if you have a Persian Yellow - throw it out immediately. It has NO RESISTANCE to BS, AND IT NEVER WILL!!! It will also infect your entire rose garden. On the other hand, I find my Fair Bianca to be wonderfully disease resistant. You must use a heavy coat of organic mulch, like shredded Christmas trees or something all around your roses!!! Rain falls on bare soil and splashes up dirt onto the leaves, infecting them with BS spores. However, with mulch, the rain will not splash up. Also, bacteria live in the mulch, and EAT the fungal spores. You do not need to wait 3 years, put down a LOT of mulch now, and you will be rewarded. Also, this means you should NOT apply any strong chemical nitrogen fertilizer - this promotes too lush of a growth, and you will get problems with powdery mildew. If you fertilize with mulch + blood meal, your roses will be extremely disease resistant. In order to combat aphids, you MUST have a good patch of totally overgrown and naturalized weedy area - this is an ecosystem which will give a place for predatory insects to live, hide, and flourish. I regularly find spiders on my roses THAT HAVE MODIFIED THEIR COLOR!!! - on a white rose, I find a white spider, in the bloom, waiting to eat a pest - on a pink rose I find a pink spider - this is actually true, but you need a wild patch where the spider can go back to, if there are not enough bugs on your roses to eat, and also to propagate and make more spiders, etc. I hope this helps. Sativa.

Now even I had to look up an acronym - SIL. ;-) Ok, so you have MS Works XLR & WPS files. The problems you are having - or going to have - is that Works is old, and the Office XP Pro your SIL gave you is also old, being actually Office 2002, version 10 of Office. If you don't have too many files, I think your best bet is to try an online file converter. Zamzar claims to be able to open and convert Works files. http://www.zamzar.com/ Save : XLR (spreadsheet) files to xlsx WPS (word) files to docx If you don't want to buy a new version of MS Office, try installing LibreOffice - the newer version of OpenOffice - and it will open xlsx and docx files [ If you want to stick with your SIL's MS Office XP Pro, then convert those files to xls & doc files, respectively. That version of Office is very old though. ] There are other ways of handling this, but probably if you you're going to try anything else, your best bet would be buy MS Works off Ebay or Amazon for $10 or so, open and convert all the files. Btw, you can't even open a .doc file in Office XP Pro ?? That's not a good sign - probably a sign of corruption. Btw #2 - When you say you can't open files, I take it they are on your current hard drive, and not within some compressed backup folder. That is, not within a zip file or the like. Re your backup cds : Can you load one of them, then rummage around in their files and tell us what you find ? (as in, names of files and extensions ?) Most likely they are proprietary formats, but if we know what they are, we could perhaps tell you how to retrieve them. Last, anyway you can get the hard drive back from the repair service ? Probably not, but it would be a second source of backup files. Let us know how it all works out.

Well, you can feast your eyes on my attic; I'm thinking you might be facing something similar. I stared at these boards, which were/are painted dirty white, for nearly 20 years before I figured out what to do. Or rather, how to decide what to do. I have two rooms upstairs. One is done in narrow boards with tons of end-to-end joints hanging in the middle of nowhere, and it's bumpy and uneven and ugly as sin. There was nothing for it but to cover it up, which I've done with panelling on one wall, and in another part of the room with wallpaper. I've also started panelling the ceiling with 1/8" maple plywood but don't have a photo of that yet. My husband is not a fan of the wallpapered part, but it works for me. I plastered (oh yes I did) all the cracks, smoothed the wall as much as I could, and papered over it. Half the room so far. For the rest, I've discovered an underpaper that may spare me the plastering. First two photos here of the original look and the panelling. Pardon the mess; after 20 years there are no empty rooms, and the house is so messy I have trouble getting presentable photos! The other room, shown in the third photo, had wider boards, not so many joints, and was installed better, flatter. That, I decided I could paint. It is shown here partly done (and with only one coat on one wall); again, pardon the stuff. Yes, this is how I work my way around the room. I am nearly done the room now, and really liking it painted, much better than I expected. I REALLY hated it when it was white with the dark floor. Am also doing a hallway, in a creamsicle orange colour, and that is looking pretty good too. So one question is, is the installation of your boards nice enough to paint? I have to admit I don't recommend the papering (sounds like that's been tried!). I used a satin finish paint; the old paint was flat, and yuck. If the boards are just bad, then consider removal or covering with panelling. Or with gyproc. An unexpected pain in these rooms is the corners. How do the walls meet? Mine have huge uneven gaps and need corner moulding. It used to have a quarter round, which I hated and have replaced with a square 1x1. I also had holes that were cut in - to get into to the attic shoulder walls - and have had to devise covers for these. Another question you might want to consider is fire safety. It should be noted that gyproc will give you a bit more time than wood, I think. Ours is a small simple house and egress is comparatively straightforward. If yours is more complicated, and if grandkids are involved, you might want a better fire-rated wall material, and that would argue for removal and gyproc. I am not a fan of multiple layers on walls - had trouble even doing the 1/8 inch ply. Maybe we just have so little space I hate to lose even an inch, plus there is spacing out the moulding, and it's messy to get through. So if you are going to do drywall, I would tend toward removal of the beadboard. You could preserve it and use it instead as wainscot, perhaps. Or as fencing. Or as moulding. Or give it away. But wow, unpainted old beadboard? I bet it's nice wood if you refinish it, but I'm not sure I'd feel obligated to keep it on the walls as it is, holes and all. Wood can actually be used around a tub; it's more resilient with water than you'd think. Karin L

Hi Jonathan, we have a 1910 Glenwood stove that was converted to gas. The fire box was to far gone and fire codes wouldn't let us replace it so we had the man that restored the whole stove drop in a kitchen aid 4 burner gas top. It still had the 3 burner gas sidecar and the gas broiler on top. We have a small electric oven up top and a larger oven in the middle. It has two storage doors on the bottom. It has the kick pedal to open up the large oven door if you don't have a free hand. It has worked out well for my family of four. We do lots of cooking and entertaining so the majority of the burners get a workout. The only thing I would change is the drop in burner tops. They are the round cast iron type and sometimes our pots don't sit well on them and may tip. I would go with a long grate the next time so the pots and pans don't have the potential to tip over. NancyLouise