SJP, This is a real puzzle because of the number of unknowns. Why do you carry empty milk jugs to water your plants. The jugs could be quart size or gallon size. The plants seem to be awful thirsty for watering two or three times a day. Not knowing the number of plants, their size and the bed size adds a special dimension to the problem. I am going to take a stab at this anyway. If someone else has a better solution please chime in. Lets see; 3 times a day at 2 one-quart jugs is 1 1/2 gallons per day for 5 days comes to 8 gallons while you are away. That is a lot of filling 2 liter bottles for your soon to be ex-roommate during this vacation. Hang 2 each 5-gallon buckets with hose attachments connecting each bucket and the last bucket has a pipe connection for a hose-bib battery operated controller which then has a manifold drip system to each plant. Problem solved cheaply but labor intensive. Does your roommate share your water bill? Go with burdening your roommate with responsibility and take her out to dinner when you get back. Aloha

I was in a similar situation. I applaud your effort, because it's not easy rotating those trays when they're full. I have a Worm Factory (pretty much the same thing as the VermiHut) and my biggest disappointment is not being able to compost all of our waste in the worm bin. What you've done is expand the working area of the VermiHut from a single tray to four trays. There's nothing wrong with this as long as you realize you're using the system in a different way than what was intended. One downside, as you discovered, is that it's hard work. It sounds like you really need more bins. You can purchase more VermiHut systems, or you could go a much cheaper route and try single or double Rubbermaid bin systems. I set up a single Rubbermaid bin and moved some of my worms from the Worm Factory to the bin. The link below is for my thread on this from a few months ago. Here is a link that might be useful: Worm Factory or Rubbermaid

"Glue, solves everything I guess lol. Sort of like duct tape :D" Not everything, but it works well when applied correctly. Trying to fasten to a tile wall to cover a hole is not a good place to be installing anchors into the tile. They might hold, but if there has already been any damage to the tile or backer just drilling a hole (even with the correct carbide tile spear point bits) can make matters worse. The tile could also pop off the backing when the screw expands the anchor making the needed repair even larger. This is a perfect place for a gap filling product like silicone seal glue. The cover can be made large enough to have an acceptable bonding area, and the silicone will stick to the smooth tile well enough to hold the cover in place once it sets. It will likely take some tape to hold the cover in place till the silicone sets up. A better repair can then be done at a latter convenient date if desired by cutting the silicone and removing the cover and any silicone remaining on the tile.

Thanks for the ideas! Unfortunately we do need it for the sink. We discussed swapping it out with one of the unplanned base cabs, but they are all bigger and really throw off the layout of everything. I don't want to paint the cabs (they are natural cherry and high quality, so pretty in person), but I love the idea of making it look like a free standing piece next to the stove! I could really play around with that as far as colors, etc. Hm. We also have all the corian that came with those cabs. It's too expensive to fabricate for the whole kitchen, but if I did the freestanding hutch type thing we could just have it fabricated for that... Hm. a 28" ikea cab would fit there nicely and could be painted. Or we have a 30" in the basement that I think can be repaired... The ikea cart was another idea floating around my brain. bmorepanic - you kinda lost me on the first paragraph ... oh, unless you are talking about the backsplash? That's a pretty idea! Thank you! More ideas floating around in there now ;)