Hi Kat, I missed your message above Caps. Thanks, you're no slouch either, I'm hoping to incorporate some of your ideas into the garden this year to give it some color and not look so sterile...I'm going to cover some of the tomato arbors with vining flowers, got that idea from your beautiful arbors :-) Tom

I had tons of bindweed when I moved to my house a few years ago. It was around so many desirable ornamentals I really couldn't spray. My method was to pull anything and everything I saw every possible day starting in the fall. The next spring, it started re-emerging and I started pulling immediately. I'm sure the plant exhausts a lot of resources in the early Spring. It could tell it was getting weaker and weaker. I was able to basically eliminate horsetail with the same diligence. I haven't seen any this year BUT you cannot rest and you can't give an inch, or a leaf as it were. My neighbor is housing the rest of the root system and it will come my way again, but I'll be ready. If you can spray, do. This stuff is noxious & evil so it deserves it. I had to take out what I would assume were old, beautiful rose bushes that were choked to death over the years. Mix 2-4,D and Triclopyr with a detergent. I had another section that did not have the ornamental. I poisoned the crap out of it. In my experience, glyosphate (RU) alone wasn't as effective on BW. 2-4,D and Triclopyr were much more effective in my experience....shriveled right up. Roundup's blackberry and vine killer has triclopyr added to glyosphate.

Thanks for checking in on our progress, patty_cakes! Unfortunately, with all of the rain we've received over the past month or so, progress came to a standstill and we are still waiting for our foundation to be poured! Construction crews all over this area are so far behind on jobs, and I'm trying to have patience. At least we presently have a house in which to live. I know that there are many who work construction here who depend on having those regular paychecks and when they stop rolling in, they really suffer. My heart goes out to them, and I'm trying to keep this all in perspective! As it now stands, our projected completion date is mid-October at the earliest. We have made all of our selections for the house, and I think I've got photos of most everything we've selected here in my "idea book." (Can you view it?) My vision was to keep things as classic and timeless as possible. We've chosen hardwood flooring throughout, with the exception of the bathrooms and the laundry which will be tiled. My kitchen will have white cabinets (with a couple of lighted Flemish-glass fronted cabinets to display my blue and white Cornishware), black granite countertops, and a glossy white subway tile backsplash. We've added crown molding throughout the house. Will have a stacked-stone fireplace in the living room (which is open to the kitchen - a concept that will be quite different than we are used to!). The bathrooms will be simply styled with white subway tile in the showers, white integrated counters/sinks, and we'll have brushed nickel hardware throughout the house. The walls will be painted a very neutral off-white -- certainly different from the Crayola box that our current house used to be! I'm yearning for simple, classic, clean. And new. Never, EVER thought I'd be saying that, but well ... here I am. :-) We'll be buying new furniture once we're in. I'm leaning towards a sectional in the main living space, and we'll need new bedroom furniture for the master and the upstairs bedroom. The little "game room" upstairs will be a space for TV watching and reading, and I'd like to furnish it sparsely but comfortably. I plan to use my paintings as pops of color, and it will be fun to figure out where to hang things once we move. I'll have to sell a few pieces, but I think I can use most of my favorites. We have already committed to plantation shutters in all of the rooms requiring window coverings, and I'm really happy with that decision. I've loved that look for ages, and am also just tired of dealing with curtains. Right now it still feels a little like a dream that's a long way off ... But I know we'll get there eventually!

Hi Houzz! You've been saving me professionally for years - helping me find contractors, designers and vendors across the country for a slew of home renovation shows that I produce. Now I'm in the midst of my biggest project yet - my first houzz! It's a nearly 100-year-old home in Oak Park, IL, just outside of Chicago. Trust me, it took a lot of convincing to get me to leave the city, but this house is worth it! A turn key dream home was never in the cards for us. My husband is a Landscape Architect and I've developed an appreciation for design over the years, so when it was time to find our house, the more the house needed us, the more we needed the house. Aka - bring on the ugly, poorly planned, never-updated house! We've owned our new home for 3 weeks and have been going full speed ahead - new roof, refinishing flooring throughout, removing decades of wallpaper, installing all new HVAC...etc. The list goes on forever. We've never hustled so hard to make a project work. Our original plan was to do the project in phases, but with a 4-year-old and a 4-month-old we're realizing that living in dust just isn't an option. We've been able to stretch our budget and use our resources to get pretty far... but we're at a standstill with the Master Bathroom. It's original and it's small and has TONS of potential to be opened up into a great space. We even locked in the design after I posted to the Houzz Design Dilemmas and got some great feedback. On one hand, we're already breaking down walls and have all of the right people in the house to get the job done, so we want to go for it. On the other hand, our budget is so tight at this point, we're not sure we can afford the fixtures and tile and fun things that would go into the bathroom and make it ours. We're really hoping our Ideabook can become our reality - but we need help! Rachel Fobes (contact information is in email I sent to casting)