I pretty much garden according to the 1/3, 2/3 rule that you cite, although I've never counted up the plants on both sides. LOL. My zone is so much colder that I don't know if I can give you enough specifics to be helpful for you. My garden goal has always been to get the absolute most out of my rather short growing season. I aim for a seven month garden starting about mid-March and going to mid-October (that probably seems pretty short to you in zone 8, but it is really stretching the season here). I also try to keep the long dreary winter months from being too stark as well, setting up a couple of spots of sedum, grasses, & evergreens that I can see from my windows during winter. I think I have accomplished my goal quite well, with a well-balanced garden that looks quite lovely through seven months and often beyond. Books that have been helpful to me include Ann Lovejoy's The American Mixed Border: Gardens for All Seasons (and many of her other books as well) and Pamela Harper's Designing with Perennials. Both of these author's are from warmer climates so you would be able to use a lot more of their plant selections in your garden design than I can. I rely heavily on the mixed shrub border approach. My season starts with as many bulbs as I can squeeze in (in specially created spaces) on my inhospitable soil (very dense wet clay) and a nice variety of spring blooming shrubs. I also use a small variety of spring &/or woodland ephemerals, such as Virginia Bluebells & Bleeding Hearts. The main spring perennial that I use with bulbs is Sweet Kate Tradescantia (spiderwort) for its chartreuse color. These are followed by a few bearded Iris and lots of Siberian Iris (long lasting spiky foliage) and Lady's Mantle (wonderful spring chartreuse flowers and interesting all season foliage). I also have a small raised gravel garden with spring alpine and various small trailing plants and a small woodland type garden with May Apples, trilliums, gingers, foam flowers, shooting stars, lots of minor bulbs, and columbines, which are later overtaken by large hostas. Evergreen shrubs are quite limited here in zone 5 compared to what you have available to you in zone 8, but I use what I can of them in my small yard, varying colors from dark & light greens, mixing shiny and dull textures, and addding spots of golds & blues. I also fill in with shrub size perennial grasses which stay up through the winter. I also try to use only shrubs that have multiple seasons of interest (one exception is Miss Kim Lilac). I'm talking about shrubs that have spring blooms and good fall color or berries, such as viburnums & aronias. I also use quite a few summer blooming shrubs as well, such as Itea (glorious long-lasting fall color) and Clethra (sweet flowers and likes wet soil), as well as Cotinus and Physocarpus with all-season lovely colored foliage. I garden on a rather small scale, a small suburban lot with more house than yard, but I use all sorts of perennials (my Excel chart lists around 275 individual types of plants, not counting 125 daylilies, 25 clematis & 50 hosta). Most are in the bays between shrubs and around and in front of them as well, along with two beds that are primarly perennial, with just a shrub or two. With this many plants in such a small amount of space, you can imagine that my garden is very heavily layered and that I depend on spring ephemerals to fade away to make room for bulging summer plants & that I cut back many perennials and shrubs quickly and heavily to show off the plants that are just coming on. I rely heavily on plants with a long season such as coreopsis, sedums, catmints & grasses and have a long list of late blooming plants (see my recent postings to the strings on fall plants for some of them). I still have rebloom on some phloxes (5 varieties, all blooming at slightly different times), catmints, sedums, some clematis & a couple of daylilies, along with one helianthus (First Light) which has not yet bloomed. Sweet Caroline Hibiscus moscheutos is still in bloom (started in August) and most of my grasses are in bloom with the exception of Miscanthus sinensis Strictus, which sometimes doesn't make it to bloom before hard frost, but is colorful enough by itself, as is the tiny Sedum sieboldii (October Daphne) which seldom blooms for me either (only in long warm falls). In summer the garden is mostly full of daylilies of every color size and shape. My daughter says it looks like Disneyland then. A wee bit overdone, I think, but I love it. The late bloomers take over next, accompanied by things that never quit like Rozanne geranium and Knockout Roses. I cheat a bit too on the daylilies that start looking shabby late in the season, by planting a big, always good looking, Baptisia in the center front of the main daylily bed. That, with a couple nice container plants and two large Sweet Autumn Clems in their full glory along the nearby fence, blinds you to any garden messes. P.S. If you are interested in pictures, please check my postings &/or homepage. Best of luck to you. Leslie

Unless that third bedroom is already tiny, I'm always hopeful that its designation as a bedroom with a tiny closet can be kept. Some codes have that there must be so many square feet to become a bedroom, but I've never had to deal with that before. Even sacrificing some space in your current bath, making it a tiny bit smaller, and taking in half of the closet of your sacrificial bedroom and maybe a couple of square feet of floor area, would that leave you the bedroom? In our little 2/1 cottage, discovering mold in the plaster behind a vanity, launched me into a real whirl of bath remodeling. It lead to the smallest 3/4 bath in a house (smaller ones in a boat), and the relocation of the fixtures in the existing bath due to wood rot and NO floor under the ugly tub. Also, I had to tear out the existing closet for bedroom #2 so the new master suite could be created using that bath and a new walkin closet. This requires a bumpout to the bath and wall of the bedroom, which is where our project is now halted because the old contractor failed to return, and the new contractor has to finish his current prohject for British Petroleum. :/ But the message is, I lost 3 closets counting the linen closet in the hall, but we will have a lot more space to use with the 18 to 20 foot long bumpout along one wall with only a small extension of the roofline. Don't give up on having your cake and eating it too. With two bedrooms and two baths here, this house now would be a good rental for two roommates. But with THREE bedrooms and two baths, you would be in the single family home market. Everybody seems to want/need at least two toilets and sinks. It does not have to take up an entire bedroom.

I have in the past, had this flooring made. Here is a breakdown of cost. 1"x4" red oak = $1.77 per board foot. Example a 10'x10' room requires 120"/2-1/2"= 48 boards. 48 boards @ 10' long = 480 board feet x $1.77 = $849.60. Next, 480 board feet milled into flooring costs $1.75 per foot = $840.00. Total material cost = $1689.6. This does make the square foot cost $16.89. This is allot higher then the typical $3.00-$5.00 per square foot cost, but some people are willing for the purpose of matching flooring precisely.

It depends also upon what that particular property is worth to you. I've seen people let $5000 keep them from purchasing a home they really wanted, and end up paying the price it could have been purchased for a few months later, for a house they liked less. Market values fluctuate. There are the comps of what a house is worth on the market at this moment, and what it is worth to you. If you pay $5000 over market value today, but get the house, maybe that purchase price is the market value in six months. Does that matter in the larger picture for what is often a30 year mortgage, and the "value" bouncing up and down? Sure, you don't want to pay more than you have to. But increasing the odds of actually being able to purchase the house you want has a value, too. How badly do you want this particular property? If low-balling increases the odds that someone else will purchase the property instead, how much does that matter to you? That is a question only you can answer. Offering an amount closer to what you said you expect to have to pay, increases the odds of your being able to purchase the property. Not all offers must be made with negotiating in mind. We offered less than market for our house, but that was what we were willing to pay with consideration to the work needed. The owner wanted more, but it was easy to decline increasing our offer, because we had already established what we were willing to pay. Don't forget that most properties get appraised, and that can affect how much price wiggling is done during the negotiations for inspection repairs, closing costs, etc. Even if they accept your lower offer, if the house appraises much higher, they will then probably not going to concede additional money. If your offer is above the appraisal, you can renegotiate (per contract) and are more likely to get a roof replacement, or whatever. In the end, it could be a wash when it comes to the final price.