I had some free time this evening (DH is out of town!) and I love playing around with sketching floor plans, so I decided to pull out my non-professional CAD program and see what I could come up with to fit your property. Idea was to see if I could give you all the rooms on the main floor that you wanted including space enough for 30 - 40 family members to gather, while maximizing the views of the lake, and allowing light to enter all major rooms from 2 directions and keep the heated/cooled square footage down to under 2800 sq ft. I also wanted to minimize west facing windows because those can bring in way too much heat. And of course, I wanted to make the main floor fully wheel chair accessible. I kind of like what I came up with so I thought I'd show it to you. The floor plan is below and below that is the house situated on your property as best as I can figure based on the photos you posted. **************************************************** FYI - all single doors are 36" wide, the staircase to basement if 4 ft wide, hallway leading to mud room is 5 ft wide with a 4 ft cased opening to the foyer. I didn't put a fireplace in the Great Room. It could go on either interior wall. His part of closet is 5 ft wide, hers is 7 ft. Shower is 50" x 102" so plenty big enough to roll a wheelchair in. I think the only thing missing is the "sun room." I left that out b/c, except in the far north, sun-rooms are one of those ideas that sound a lot better than they often work out to be. But, if you really really want one and otherwise like the plan, the banquette could be shifted over to where the patio doors are, the kitchen patio doors moved to where the banquette is and then a sun-room with south and west facing windows could be placed in the corner between garage and kitchen. Even with windows on just two sides (south and west), I think it is likely to get way too hot for regular use tho. Besides, another alternative would be to make the sitting room into a semi-sun-room by using floor to ceiling glass. South and southeast facing windows would get plenty of light without admitting quite so much heat. Anyway, if you like the layout, feel free to use it as is or with any changes you see fit to make. I just do this for fun so I'm happy to waive all copyright claims.

Rose - yeah, he's been gone just shy of two months. I know what you mean about Murphy's law. It seemed everything went wrong the day after he left. Patty - since we changed realtors, we have a new listing description and I think she did a good job capturing the important features. I sent her all the photos I took for the first listing and let her choose. She said when my house first came on the market the first time, she chose not to show it solely on the kitchen photo. She said it make the room look much smaller than it is. She chose to do more outside pics and included a photo of the DR looking over the LR. She chose more outside pics because she said that outdoor living is VERY important in Tucson during the year, except for summer. She wanted to capture the two patios in the back as well as the nice patio in the front with all the landscaping. That may not have been my choice, but I'm going to trust her on this one -for now. I like the description she wrote and I was surprised when she used "immaculate". I think that's a nice compliment. One of the comments from the lookers yesterday was she loved my decor, but it wasn't the house for them. That's ok. The feedback was positive! YAY! This realtor has 22 years experience, so I'm going to go with the flow for a bit. She knows what she's doing and the other one is top notch too. I'm happy to have two working for us. I'm posting the link to our new listing at the Remax site even though we're listed with another company. I don't want to skew the stats for public hits on the MLS site or the realtor's site, so if you want to look, please look at the link below. I checked Realtor.com and it's not there yet, which most likely is b/c it hasn't updated with the MLS. Hopefully it will be on by the end of the day today or tomorrow at the latest.

Part 2 As far as supplies, I'd contact major online suppliers and any local scrapbook, office supply and craft stores to see of they will work with you when purchasing supplies. They may give you free shipping, put together a basic kit to donate to you or give you a discounted rate for purchases since it's for a school. Your kind of class will undoubtedly inspire many a scrapbooker to continue long after the class is over and if you make it known where the supplies came from, they are more likely to go to that same place to purchase their own supplies in the future. That might be a good incentive for a business to donate supplies. (If you find you are forced to pay for a lot of things yourself, post messages on several bulletins boards explaining your situation and asking for donations of any extra supplies people have and I'll bet you'll get supplies pouring in! The downside to that would be you wouldn't know what you're getting- you might end up with ten of this and none of that-, what condition it would be in and it may not be wise to give out your address on the net. If you do this I'd suggest using the school address, "attn.: your dept.", or getting a P.O. box and only post that address. It's been done with great success in the past.) I don't shop online much, but some great online suppliers are dMarie.com (I have shopped here and was very pleased), twopeasinabucket.com, pebblesinmypocket.com, and Keeping Memories Alive at scrapbooks.com. CK magazine has a lot of great advertisements and I'm sure you can find more suppliers to appeal to in there. These are just the few suppliers I can think of off the top of my head. I'd recommend using large tables rather than individual desks for several reasons. You can have groups of four or five (even six if the tables are large enough) at a table and share supplies easily, eliminating the need for many duplicates. Also the area afforded on an individual desk will probably be too small a workspace. Have students supply their own basics such as: scissors, their choice of adhesive (you'll want to explain and/or demonstrate each type of suggested adhesives, emphasizing what ever they choose it must be acid-free), a basic black journaling pen (with acid-free ink) and, of course, photos. Preferably ones that are duplicates. Third, what to teach and how to teach it. That will depend largely how much time you have. If it is a class in and of itself, you will be able to be more flexible than if it's a short section of another class. The best way to learn how to scrapbook is to actually do it so Id give demos and give them lots of class time to work on their own. I would start with the basic principles of design, color wheel, etc. These would be good quiz material. There is a book put out by CK called "Simple Scrapbook Makeovers" that I believe specifically addresses it as it applies to scrapbooking. There were several scrapbooking books I got from the library that had that info in them as well. I cant think of the titles now because since Id had design classes I didnt pay much attention to that part of the books. For the final test or exam you could make it a take-home type project and give them time in class to work on it to use class supplies. You could require certain elements like, 1)one layout should use the element of balance, 2)one layout should use a complimentary color scheme, 3)one should use one of the following techniques: list two or three techniques you covered in class and give them their choice, etc. Make it based upon how well they can incorporate the principles you teach into their albums. Layouts usually take an average of an hour to complete. Some longer, some shorter. I would allow this as a minimum for beginners of high school age. Say, they should have at least one layout done and another started for every two class periods. They will get faster as they do it longer. I can think of a few different ways you could teach it. You could 1)demonstrate one technique and give students a class period or two to create their own layout using that method. 2)You could demonstrate all of them, say one or two per day for a week, giving them handouts and showing examples, and the next week they can work on layouts using whichever techniques they want to try. (continued...)

I don't think I've purchased a single item over $110 in years. Yesterday I bought a $189 chocolate wool pea coat for around $50 after promos, coupons and discounts. Woo. I think I'd have to save a lot more money than a little sales tax to deal with NJ drivers ;). I am guessing the 66% off is more of a 2/3 thing than a biblical thing. I don't think the 30/40/50% discounts they have on other stuff is anything significant. BTW I don't think anyone was saying they didn't support it because it was christian - I think they don't support it because they support a particular person who happens to be a christian who they don't wish to support. There is a big difference.