Sorry to hear about your plants. Hope the greenhouse can be repaired without to much difficulty. I had a problem with slugs damaging my hostas. Someone told me to try putting coffee grounds around the plants. I did. I still see slug trails in the mornings but they haven't touched my hostas in three years. I get free coffee grounds from Starbucks. They package their used grounds for gardeners and generally have them in a bin near the door. Good luck. Bernie

Baligirl, Hooray for your. Truly this is an adventure and you will love changing your space. It takes energy, perseverance, flexibility (You have this as you have been living with the scary cook top) and patience. I urge you to post your kitchen even a hand drawing with traffic patterns, doorways, outlets, water, gas and measurements. Let me tell you why. My biggest reno REGRET: I wish I had posted my kitchen shell measurements and floor plan. I regret that I did not seek ideas or suggestions from others on GW. Being new to GW, I was embarrassed about my before kitchen. I was afraid I could not afford the changes people might counsel. Fearing that GW advice might be about the elite spending more (Wolfe, Subzero, Lacanche, Hand scraped oak floors, imported marble tile�), I hid away my insignificant simple little kitchen improvement. I avoided posting specifics. Now, after being on GW for more than a year, I realize others are genuinely helpful. They understand some can afford the moon and others more like a rock. This is perfectly fine and in fact I have since learned some of the most brilliant kitchen renovations are not of the sky's the limit budgets but the average Joe. There are amazing GWebbers who can stick to a budget with the resourceful frugality of a depression era grandma. And a bucketful of ingenious wisdom that can find a solution that is out of this box or even out of this world. I wish I had posted my mock up floor plan because now that things are in place I have since learned I could have done EVEN better. My next space will have a stamp of GW wisdom all over it. : ) ~boxer

Get a release from your subs, so they can't put contractors leins on your home. Our story....we did a substantial addition to our home about fifteen years ago. (That long?!!!) The day before we were supposed to close on our construction loan, our loan officer called and said our GC was in bankruptcy, and that they would not approve the loan if we used him, unless he could provide some kind of collateral info from his bank. When I called him to ask, he went mental on me. Our second choice scrambled to get a formal estimate put together within hours for the bank, and we were able to close as scheduled. Boy, was I ever grateful that #1 had poor credit, and that our loan officer was watching out for us. Our addition went smooth as silk, our contractor was an absolute pleasure to work with, the addition is wonderful,he actually saved our home from burning down when he came back to install one last lightswitch cover, and discovered a bag of trash I had leaned against the garage was smouldering.

I have a positive update. I tried the "download & go" feature for the first time in a while and it finally worked! So Whirlpool is making some progress. What's funny is that at one point a Whirlpool support person insisted this is not one of the washer's features even though it's in all the literature and is an option for the washer in the app. But the washer and dryer still have minds of their own. I have videos that will make you shake your head at all the malfunctions. Last night I put a BIG load of wet laundry in the dryer and I couldn't get the dryer to start because the touchscreen was acting up. After much frustration the dryer reset itself and started working again, but not before I practically threw something at it and feared I'd have this big load of wet laundry with no way to dry it. UGH! Maybe one of these days these things will work as expected but Whirlpool is very slow in fixing this stuff. I'm afraid the touchscreen issues aren't fixable because they chose to use low end components to save a few pennies. Time will tell. Update: This is ridiculous. I left that load of laundry in the dryer overnight and just unloaded it. After I opened the dryer, I got a notification on my phone that the drying was complete. How convenient that 24 hours later, after I've unloaded the dryer, the dryer lets me know the laundry is done! This is like a comedy routine. But not funny :-(