Ah--you guys have definitely got the picture. What I plan to do, if this sounds like it will work, is create risers from the old allan block. Cover them slightly with sand and set the granite on top to form the tread (4 feet by 14 inches by 2-1/2 thick), overhanging slightly. If there's money leftover, I would mortar veneer stone to cover the exposed risers (the allan block is a mish-mash of shapes and sizes). Bigger pieces of granite would be perfect, but sadly not in the budget. The size I have described comes from a local quarry and is about $60 per tread. However, I never thought about making them tightly together so that no fill-in material would be required on top of the tread (a little like the curve of a spiral staircase--you can't really walk on the inside corner, because the exposed tread is very small, but you use the outside corner). A little trickier to execute: in the tight corner the granite would have to be tucked UNDER the riser. Ack!

OH, I feel your pain, believe me. Mid July, I had an afternoon doc appointment and left the house about 1PM. I left 12 tom plants growing in huge pots inside the fenced in yard. All where at least 4 feet tall. I was hysterical when I got home, every one of them had been eaten by a groundhog that found the one and only spot left to get in under the fence. All where loaded with toms, buds and flowers and a couple of the cherries where starting to ripen. they where anywhere from 6-12 inches tall. Yes they've all come back and look good, but no where near what they where and they all have a couple of toms on them, but the crop is going to be extremely sparse this year. It's been full fledged war for me this year with the chipmunks and grounhogs. whitegarden, email me and I'll give you some ideas about controlling the chipmunks. If we are lucky though, this massive heat and humidity that created an explosion of them will also be their doom. Not enough food for all of them to survive and plenty didn't survive in my yard this year. Now if we have a cold and relatively normal snowy winter, all the excess chipmunks will not survive the winter. Fran

I have been getting to some of the things that have been on my list recently, finally. One was setting up electronic payments for as many things as possible; I did that a few days ago. Another was getting both of my pianos tuned. I set that up for today, and the tuner will be here this afternoon. Another that I've been procrastinating on forever is getting new blinds for our bedroom and the two bathrooms. We have these stained and falling apart plastic miniblinds left by the POs; these rooms absolutely need blinds for privacy, but it took me a while to figure out what kind I wanted to get. I finally did that and the blinds guy is also coming here this afternoon (just before the piano tuner) to measure and show me samples so I can get an estimate. I also decided on a plan for reorganizing our paper files; the solution involved buying a new file cabinet, which I did this morning (to be delivered Monday). I find that if I take a day off of work (like I did today) and plan to take care of some of these PITA things then, I can get more done than when I try to fit them in around a normal work day.

Mary, I'm in a very similar situation as you. I live in Denham Springs and our home was flooded as well. I'm trying to find a custom cabinet maker that isn't three months out. Would you mind sending me the information on whom you used out of Mississippi? It's getting to the point where cabinets will be holding us up as we just are about done with taping and floating our Sheetrock. Any help you could provide would be great. And thanks for this original post as it has been very helpful!