My husband was in michigan this week and that was one of the flights he thought about taking on thursday night. He flies a lot and it just hit close to home. Clarence is not far from where we live. We are a little more out in the country. Big sigh of relief. When the news came on at 10pm they announced at the end of the broadcast that a plane had crashed by the airport, but they didn't know anything yet. By the time the 11pm news came on, it was not until after the weather that their news crews made it to the neighborhood and they announced it was a commercial plane. WIVB broadcast without commercial break until I went to bed at 2am. When my husband called to say he was alright i was so grateful. (wipes tears and sniffles) Fran, Could i have the blanket flower, please? BTW, DS#3 watered my keyboard once, its still a little iffy. We set it in from of the blower on the woodstove for a week. Just FYI those of you sowing in the keys LOL! Thank all of you for the prayers. Families here are esp. close knit and things like this are difficult for anyone. Praying for your FIL, too Nichol. Fleethart

...the 35" aisles are actually wider than most doorways. True, but it's narrower than a hallway (code is 36" in my neck of the woods). But I'm not sure what this has to do with the kitchen. It's still less than NKBA recs (although just barely) and given how you generally abide by them and post them here often, I'm surprised that you strayed from them in 2 of your plans. If that's a major path from garage or bedrooms to the rest of the house, I wouldn't want it to be too meager. (twn85, where does that hallway lead to?) You and I differ about fridge placement. I'd rather not have it blocking or taking up what could be great dish storage near the table. If the fridge is on the back wall to the right of the island, I don't see how someone going to the fridge will get in the cook's way. It's still at the perimeter. btw, I'm betting the window is about 2' in because the sink is right in the corner. And I'm betting the wall oven is to the left of the sink. Lovely home, twn85! Looks like you have a great space to work with. But, uh, that is one weird room divider in that kitchen. It looks like a wooden version of old-time bank teller bars. How do you access your back yard? Oh, and I just realized that you gain 4.5" to your space. You gave us dimensions for the kitchen and for the DR but since that wall is coming down, those inches are added to the overall space.

A long time ago, I did a Mint Mate install(actual install, not live) onto a 16GB Gigaware USB flash drive. It booted slow as molasses and the first time running apps was just as slow. It ran fine afterward though. I considered getting a faster flash drive such as a SanDisk Extreme, but it wasn't it my budget at that time. I seem to remember playing around with bcd.exe but my memory is short. Some day I'll have to give EasyBCD a try. In the meantime, GRUB works for me. An extraordinarily boring (and embarrassing, mostly because I flubbed customizing GRUB2 because I'm too lazy to learn to use it properly right now) video of my installing Mint Mate alongside Windows 10 in a virtual machine... I suppose the point is that they can, at least sometimes, live happily beside one another. I was really expecting Mint Mate to offer to "install alongside windows" and auto-partition but it did not. Don't some other Ubuntu based distros do that? Or is it just full blown Ubuntu? Anyway, after all my stumbling, doing it incorrectly, redoing etc., Grub now reads exactly the way I want, remembers the previous boot choices etc. ... That's just a virtual machine though. I wouldn't suggest others try it on their real machines. I suppose if one were to practice setting up a dual boot system, a virtual environment would be the safe place to learn, right? BTW, I used Oracle's VirtualBox in the above videos. Free and open source. Oops, I just read the warning on the VirtualBox download page: "Please be aware that Windows 10 is not yet officially supported!" Oh well, seems to run fine for me.

* Should sink stay on island or move under new window. I like seeing everyone while doing dishes but hate the constant mess in the center of the room. If the sink moves from the island, we'll replace it w an 18" prep sink I would move the sink to the area beneath the window. Think of it this way, the 'constant mess in the center of the room," vs. a half hour at most doing the dishes with your back to everyone. * Which layout below is best? Between option A and B: Depends upon your opinion as to which item you would want to look at from dining area, a refrigerator or a pantry. I really want a larger pantry, the one that we have is double doors and always hanging open when the kids are in and out and such an eyesore. I would think the first pic would have soft close doors, so even a gentle hip bump would be enough to close them. As for a corner pantry, I have never looked at those so have no opinion.