I would make friends with your local nursery, take photos of the house with you and simply be honest with them. Tell them you are an very happy new home owner, overwhelmed, don't know anything about gardening/landscaping but you really could use some help to come up with a 3/5 year landscaping plan. A lot of nursery owners will come to your house free as long as you purchase a plant or two. (huge help) Start with a tree in between garage windows. Plant it at least 5 feet from house. (make it an anniversary gift so it starts memories/roots for the two of you) Plant other trees or more expensive special plants on important dates as they come, children, promotions, birthdays... Definitely go slow, but you will be amazed at how far a couple hundred dollars can go. Hang some plants on the porch it will fill in and soften the porch area. Don't forget winter color too, like red twig dogwoods, willows, --- Lastly, paint that front door a fun color that you love! ;-) Enjoy & Good luck!!

I use pencils every day to write down notes, lists, reminders. I like a nice sharp point too. There are a lot of bad pencils out there which don't sharpen well. You can waste a lot with that first sharpening in an electric machine. I think Ticonderoga is one of the better ones. Of course students still use pencils in school!

Thanks! I started reading on the composite shakes and have realized I’ve seen these in a new subdivision in a nice area here in NW AR. I wonder how they’d hold up in our climate over decades versus asphalt shingles?

The actual shape and dimensions of the house make a big difference and you shouldn't design your floor plan around the cheapest roof so its difficult to give you a useful answer. However, neither shape requires roof trusses so, if the plan were square, for a gable roof shape the rafters could span half the width of the house and therefore be economically sized but a shed roof would need rafters that were twice as long and much larger unless you installed a large beam the width of the house at the mid-span of the rafters. The gable roof would also have much less exterior wall. But the shed roof would have more opportunites for high windows in case you like that. If you are in snow country, the gable roof would probebly allow a steeper roof slope. In either case I would avoid ventilating the roof.