Suebot - don't think i'm going to tell you anything that somebody else hasn't said, but since i've had too much experience with deer & rabbits, i figured i'd concur with the remedies that worked for me. i used to live/learned to garden on nantucket and martha's vineyard, where the deer are at least as unreasonably tame and probably more abundant than they are in ct. i've heard stories of people standing 10 ft away from them yelling at them while they chomp on their hydrangea flower buds. one woman i was talking to claimed she saw the deer attacking her dalmation!! anyway, my first thought about your original message was are you sure all damage is due to deer and not rabbits? - when they stand on their hind legs, they can eat quite high - on a couple of my client's properties on the islands, i had more problems with bunnies than deer, especially with my daylilies & echinacea. so, i also found success with the deer away spray products; i can't remember which one i used, but i believe it had garlic & mint in it and i actually liked the way it smelled. the directions said to spray every couple of weeks (??), but i found that i had to spray every couple of days or so & definitely after a rain. it was pretty time consuming. unfortunately, my other success was fencing in the gardens. i just tried to be decorative about it - i used nice cedar posts with caps, bird netting @ 4' high (you can't really see it, so the garden still looks nice), i hung rope along the top of the netting (for a nautical look...). I did throw netting on top of the gardens in the spring until things grew too tall, but i have to admit, the deer hopped in a couple of times (- that would've been a mess i kind of would have liked to see). i now live in maine and have a large cutting garden in my back yard, a good distance from my house and i use the bird netting as the fencing (simply because it was the only fencing i could find that would be high enough in one piece) and it works (doesn't handle snow load, though). i see deer in the back and they walk right around the garden. chipmunks are now my problem. unfortunately, my true feeling is that if the deer want to get to something, they will. sorry to be so lengthy, good luck. just out of curiosity, do you have phlox and is it being eaten - that always gets destroyed the worst for me. -mara

It's going to depend upon your doors. If you're going with your original doors, which sound like a standard overlay (means you can see the rails and stiles around your doors) you will probably have to attach that center piece to one of the doors to block the space. It'd look pretty bad, IMHO, if you just had them hanging there, not meeting. If you get new doors, full overlay, butt doors, you won't see the space. It's less expensive to buy doors than it is to buy whole new cabinets. I recently asked people who have the butt doors if they can see in the spaces. The answer was no. I am considering removing some of those center pieces myself. I dislike the constriction of access. But my evil plan is to buy some doors from the Door Stop that I really, really like. We'll see! :) Christine

I almost forgot about the roof shingles being two different types and colors! What is being done about that?? Did they just go over the original shingles or take off and prep the area? Do you have gutters? If so do you have any leaf prevention added to the gutters? I'd check them out. Why am I asking? Just before I bought my own house, the roof had been replaced and I did not know it at the time, but there were several downspouts that were clogged that had caused water backups in the yard and water leaks in the house. When we got around to sleuthing what was really happening, (after repeated gutter "solutions" with various degrees of success) we discovered what the REAL problem was ....wait, you guessed it...old shingles were stuffed in the center of the downspouts!!! Don't let something like that happen to you! For yours, since there was apparently not supervision for them to put the correct shingles on your house, and for them not to notice, and to throw trash off your roof or at least pile up the trash all over and not clean up like their website states, find out what else might have been overlooked or rushed. They obviously need to redo the roof to all be one color and the actual color and type of shingle you specify. You need to have some serious meetings with your GC and this company and even see if they will be the ones to redo the work or not. Or maybe they would be fine with proper supervision, as is so often the case. And of course all of that correction, and supervision, will be on someones else's dime and not yours. The tree is still another matter and will need some very serious compensation or someone might be buying a new mature tree for you. I also had a devastating loss regarding a mature tree that was the pride of my backyard that unfortunately I had not realized the twisted branches that covered 1/3 of my park like backyard, was coming from the sister tree across the fence and on my neighbor's property and not my own. So when they unceremoniously chopped down their side of the sister 40 year old healthy Live Oak (the two tallest in the neighborhood), I was absolutely devastated. The branches were so intertwined I had no idea the tree I loved was half from the neighbors. I lost so much shade and privacy. So at least yours is clearly on your own property so I would fight that as strongly as you can. As you stated, these are lessons learned for going forward and I hope you get a good plan together for correcting these mishaps and prevention of others with the proper meetings and supervision, for the more detailed interior of your remodel.

I think the key word above is "appear" because to me these OTR microwave ovens look like they are not flush by two or three inches. From an earlier post: "If I can use the top vent [to] go up through the cabinet and resolve the ductwork above that cabinet, that vent will care for the stove venting and the magnatron venting, and I would not need a MW with a front-facing louver." In my view, neither this nor any other microwave oven venting scheme I'm even vaguely aware of will "care for the stove venting" because they move far too little air per unit time and the units do not overhang the burners sufficiently. Perhaps if a supplementary blower designed for higher pressure loss is used in the path taken by the this so-called ventilation to augment the flow rate, barely adequate air flow will be possible. But even then, capture area will be too small to have much effect on front burner plume capture. You can design for style and give up on having adequate ventilation, or design for adequate ventilation and give up on OTR microwave ovens. Your statement "For what it's worth, most of the cooking on our stove is boiling water or soup, scrambling eggs, or simmering an occasional kettle of sauce." suggests that you can get away with doing the former. In that case, provide manufacturer specified cooling paths for the magnetron, and ignore limitations of the mediocre or worse ventilation. And don't sear steaks on the cooktop before baking them in the oven.