When you get comments from neighbors and landscape designers such as they have "wall envy", your wall is probably the nicest in the neighborhood, or this was beautifully done, you start to realize how valuable it is. I personally have never seen a prettier wall IRL. The wall is about 15 years old and shows no signs of failing any time soon. We have "dreamed" of the raw land and what we would have done with it and you are spot on, we would have placed the steps directly in line with the back door and embedded the steps into the retaining wall...no question about it. When I was planning out our upper West side, it was exasperation that I "took out" the seemingly misplaced Maple in the plan, that a great plan was found, which incorporated the Maple in it's current home. I get my best ideas from dreaming larger. I think by the time I post anything here, I've already done my thinking outside the box, and I'm trying to have others get me over a hump. The fact though, the wall has been built and we need to get from point A to point B. My DH and I have always been about value when it comes to purchases/decisions. Though I shared a pic of our house, this view is seen by only a few people during the summer. We of course see it up close and personal every time we venture down to the beach. Being up close to the wall, we will rarely see the view that I shared of the entire wall. A 4-6' blip in the wall, I can't imagine being unsightly. We will design the steps to be as transparent as possible. I'm thinking long term, if we end up placing the decking steps down the middle and it ends up functioning just as we dreamed, we might just pony up the bucks to have the wall redone, lose some of the main patio to embedded steps, by cutting somewhat into the concrete. But then again we might just determine, the steps go unnoticed and we keep using the deck steps as is. We find the longer we live here, the more things we THOUGHT we wanted to do for sure, are getting nixed. With the addition of patio, it will change the way we use the backyard a lot!!! Who knows while we wait for the steps to be put in, we may find out that the West entrance onto the beach will work after all. I doubt it, but I'm leaving it as a possibility. I think again I might be missing something, if I have deck steps opposed to embedded stone steps, the only compromise I think we are making is aesthetics. Is there something else?

I have had a Whirlpool Gold fridge for about 8 - 10 years now. A 36" S x S with ice in the door. It has never given us one minute of trouble. But now it is beginning to show some age, with the plastic cover over the light bulb cracking/breaking. As we complete our remodel, we will replace it with either another Whirlpool Gold or a KitchenAid or(maybe a JennAir). We have been very pleased with this frig.

Coolmama, you dodged a bullet there, huh? Thank goodness for that! I hope she will learn something from this. Rrah, I don't know about the legality of it (where you live or here) but when I moved (newly divorced) from CA to GA with my children (girl 4 and boy 6) the apartment complexes would not rent to me at all unless I rented a three bedroom place so that there would be separate bedrooms for me and each of the children. My kids were saying that they wanted to share a room - no surprise given all the changes in their little world. But it was not possible for me to rent a two bedroom apartment since my children were different sexes. That ultimately meant that rather than renting a really nice place in a decent neighborhood (that I could afford) I had to rent a three bedroom apartment (for the same price) in a complex where drug deals went down in the parking lot and ladies (ahem) worked nights at home. In what way was that beneficial for my children? BTW, they still shared a room. Their choice. I used the extra bedroom for an office and worked on starting a business there. Eventually I got it going and was able to work from home....a FAR better insurance against whatever the apartment people were afraid of than their stupid policy. Needless to say, I got out of that apartment complex and into a house as soon as possible - and, yes, it had three bedrooms. (sheesh) But the arbitrary rules!! What are these idiot lawmakers thinking?

You can do this. It will be all right. But you need to plan, not just let this happen to you. I find lists and folders help. The thing about organizing is that you have to do it, not just wish it (VERY BIG GRIN). That means, somewhere between the health and safety of your children, and the next most important thing you do, you have to make organizing a priority, if you're going to maintain organization. The folders method is great because if you keep up with it, it only takes seconds at a time, and half an hour once in awhile. Making a few seconds to put away a paper a high priority isn't so hard, even with the demands on your attention that you have. Here's one way to deal with the papers: You can start by color coding the world. Find a filing area that's not in the zone where the remodel will take place, but is easily accessible from where you spend most of your days. Get a file box or drawer for kids and family, one for kitchen, one for mudroom/powder room/pantry/laundry room, and one for the upstairs bedroom and bathrooms. If the boxes/drawers don't come in different colors, use big, colored stickers or paint so that you an tell them apart at a quick glance. Oh! And if you need to stack them you really want drawers, whether it's a filing cabinet or drawer style units. If they're going to be horizontal on the floor or a low table or shelf, top opening is usually easier. It helps to get the pendaflex kind that sit on rails or channels. They're easier to take in and out, and to keep from falling over. Invest in both file folders and pocket folders in 10 colors (you can put a pocket folder, or a standard file folder, inside a pendaflex folder in the box/drawer for ease of access). Have a color for each family member. Use the three most distinctive colors for the kitchen, other downstairs, and upstairs, and match them to the boxes. Every time you get a piece of paper put it in the appropriate folder. Like the baby's immunization papers. Just slip them in the baby pink folder, and you'll have them to hand. A few times a year you can go through the folders and reorganize them. Like have a plain color (manila) immunizations folder that all the kids' records get filed into eventually, and your and your husband's last tentanus boosters and flu shots too. Within your kitchen box, make folders for each kind of inspiration: Color, cabinetry, light fixtures, etc., and have a big one for general "I like this kitchen". Go through your computer bookmarks and print the pictures that you want to show your husband and architect and file them appropriately. Make sure the name of the website and/or bookmark is on each page. Stick them in your folders. Make a budget. Do your research and figure out the absolute least each thing will cost you to get what you need and write it down. Find the absolute most you think you'd be willing to spend on the same thing to get the look or whatever that you want. Write it down. Put these numbers on the covers of your folders so that you can just chuck out the pictures of specific things that you know you can't afford, or write "something with this kind of look" across them. This is a big investment of time to get started, and some money as well, but as things get going it'll really really help if you have all this organized. Really. I needed to find a piece of paper from my tile setter last night, and I couldn't find my tile folder. I was starting to panic a little because I knew I took it to the tile store. I knew I brought it back. I knew it wasn't in the car. I kept thinking and thinking about where it could have gone. Finally I remembered the laundry basket full of clean clothes which I'd done at my mother's house, which I'd carried upstairs the day before with birthday presents to wrap in it, etc., and hadn't touched. If I hadn't buried the folder under bags and mail, etc., and put it away when I got home, I would have saved myself half an hour and a lot of worry. The thing is, if you have your folders set up well, you don't really have to organize within them. Highly organized people do, but if you just can get the right paper in the right folder, and keep the blue folder in the blue box, you can find anything you want or need. If you get more than 20-30 pages in a single folder, it's probably time to split it into more specific topics, however. BTW, receipts and invoices should go in their own folder, rather than with their topics. Makes it much easier to figure out how much you're spending and on what. A few more things stand out in your initial post: Your husband works crazy hours, your children (lovely as I'm sure they are) have maxed out the number allowable for one adult to care for in a day care setting, so I'm sure they're a full time handful. So, first off, that overwhelmed feeling is a good thing--it's you telling you that this very large project is pushing you to the limits. But you can manage it. Before you pay large deposits and start tearing open your house, you and your husband should make plans for exactly how much time he can spend working on the house without going crazy. The realistic answer may be five hours a week, tops. Maybe ten. So make a list of the things that can be done in that amount of time--without little helpers--including set-up and clean-up time and see what tasks you can realistically assign to him. Also, well before the remodelling begins, figure out how you're going to handle the children in a construction zone. Start teaching them the rules, like never touch a tool with a cord on it, or we go up to this line and no farther. Find some friends with remodelling going on and see if you can, with several adults supervising, take the kids to see what it's going to be like, hear the loud noises, and start to learn the rules. Budget for a $10,000-$20,000 (minimum) repair that you didn't know you'd need until they open up the walls. If it doesn't happen, you'll have that much more for some of the nicer wishlist things, or that much more to send your kids to college, or whatever. The real budget killers, however, are the things that are only a little more than you've allotted. This tile is prettier, and costs $12.50/sq.ft. instead of $10. That cabinetry is only $1000 more. A glaze is only $600. Etc., etc. All those onlys add up to a huge amount!!! That's why I suggested to label each item with the most you're willing to spend on it, as well as what you really expect to spend. When you're doing trade-offs, as you make your decisions, it's easier to stick to that, than to juggle numbers in your head about how much you're sort of saving here that you can indulge there. As to the rest, it sounds like you have a handle on your budget and a good idea of what you want. That really helps!! A lot of people just want magic. :-) Keep posting here. You'll get lots of good, practical advice on what works and what doesn't, how to improve your layout, and all the little details.