WOW, what a response! Thank you all for the input and for the compliments on the house. She is a cute little thing even with the remuddles and the *cringe* vinyl siding and windows, I just think the plain cream and white is a little bland and could use a wee bit of perking-up. That porch is one of the things that drew us to the house though. Fern(s) it shall be! I wasn't sure if conventional faux plants would hold up to the sun and rain but it sounds like they will do OK. Home Depot had some inexpensive ones (like $19.99) last year so I will check there and I'll start with one in front. Everyone's very happy with the wind chimes now that they've been moved to the side. It's amazing what ten feet and some shrubbery (very overgrown OLD lilacs which are being butchered for "rejuvenation" this fall, but the arborist says that's the only way to salvage them) does to mellow the volume! They're also deep-toned ones rather than the high-pitched plinky-plink kind. They were only $10 at Walmart last year. A carved plaque reading "merry meet" has been ordered to go over the mailbox, but it won't be very visible from further away than the porch itself as it's only about half the width of the mailbox. I had a wreath over it but it blew off. :-p teacats, that's what the BACK porch is for! *wink wink nudge nudge* *snicker* amysrq, your response to flyleft was the best laugh I've had all day. :-) bungalow_house, gingerbread is most definitely on the "someday" list! I love these simple square brackets, with a similar gable trim. We know the house was very plain to begin with so we want to keep the tarting-up relatively low-key as well. SH, love those purple stairs! The porch floor (ye olde battleship gray, the norm for this style house here) actually hasn't been painted lately, it needs to be torn up and replaced as it's pretty rotten in many areas. Ditto for both sets of steps. We may be completely un-period and use a composite product because it accumulates snow and ice something fierce in the winter. Next year, we hope. I do dream about a house in shades of purple though. There's a real charmer of a Queen Anne in my town all done up in shades of lavender: flyleft, I can't carry the water to keep plants alive right now. I'm not walking much without a cane and my hands aren't working too well (but I am the fastest two-finger typist I know!) so even drought-tolerant plants are pretty much out... I think if I ask DH to do one more thing he may do me an injury. :-) In general though I loathe grubbing around in the dirt, I know some people find it enjoyable but I consider it miserable drudgery. Blame my parents, who dragged me out for endless roasting, sunburnt hours weeding their enormous vegetable gardens. Blech. :-) We will do some landscaping stuff on the front but not this year as I will need to have a hosebib installed so we can do a drip-irrigation thingy like we did in the previous house. namabafo is correct, I am not selling the house - the first picture is from when we bought it to show how it looks with some actual greenstuffs around it. I should have captioned that. :-) The porch is smaller than it looks so it can only really support one chair (I LOVE this classic Bar Harbor style one but OMG the price, I would just die if someone swiped it so I'd have to chain it down!) in the front corner, which is on the shopping list for when I have some spare cash. Might be next summer instead of this one. If it were deeper we'd hang a porch swing! I'm in love with these copper house numbers but at well over $50 for two... woof. OH, and just to crow and brag - we finally cleared the last room of boxes this weekend! It only took us 7 1/2 months! LOL We now have a guest room. Thankfully we already have pretty much everything for it, recycled from the old house. so that's one room that won't cost me much money.

I think it depends not only on height but arm length. I'm 5' 1" but that is because my legs are short - my torso is pretty normal height. My arms are short too so I find the 36" counter height relatively comfortable. We kept the island at 36" partly because we didn't want to lose 2" of storage height under the counter. For a 34" high island, one also might want to use a less deep prep sink if you will have one there. Ours is 10" deep and I can reach the bottom fine, but two inches lower it would start to require too much bending. A lower height would have been nice on the range top for me. It's okay at 36" but 34" would ease reaching into deep pots and back burners.

For anyone who thinks guns aren't the problem, perhaps a little research would serve you well. I doubt that anyone who adhers to that kind of thinking would allow themselves to be persuaded, but facts certainly can't hurt. Do you honestly believe the extremely high rate of mass killings in the US is because we have so many more evil or dangerously mentally ill people? Compare the US to other high-income countries and you see that what sets the US apart is the amount of guns in this country. Guns are far better regulated in the other countries. The violence in the US is so much more lethal because it is too easy for criminals, the dangerously mentally ill, and underage kids to get guns. Death rates in the US are 7 times higher than the rates among nations that have similar wealth because our death rate from guns is Twenty Two times higher. Astounding to me. Just a quick example. On the exact same date as Sandy Hook, a man in China who was classified as mentally disturbed, used a knife to attack and wound 22 school children. All his victims survived. Almost every person wounded in Newtown died. Unregulated private gun sales benefit criminals, gun traffickers and the gun industry at the expense of all of us. Those kind of sales could be enforced without taking guns away from law-abiding owners. I can't imagine that people really believe that our extremely high rates of deaths from mass murders is because our gun laws are too strict.

The two in the middle are the ones you need (the ones Carol showed). They go in the seams thru the lining. The top of the drapery pin (what they're called) would be about 1/4" to 1/2" down from the top. You'll need one at the leading edge, about 1/2" from the edge. The other end is the return edge which goes to the wall. I put a tenter hook in the wall and sew a small ring on the edge to hang onto the hook. The hooks from the drapery pins go into the small rings that are on the bottom of drapery rings that hang on a rod. The drapery pins can be adjusted if necessary.