I really really really wanted Charlie's Soap to work for me, but I too found fading. I have used Cheer (I don't know how bad it is, everyone seems to use Tide here) for years and have never had a problem with fading. I am on a well, so we don't get the normal fading that happens over the years like people on city water. They have chlorine added in, which works like a bleach. I love the way clothes smelled and felt using the Charlies, but I have shirts that are 5 years old, washed every few weeks, that still look new. Does anyone have any suggestions as to stopping the fading? It works great on my whites, makes them just beautiful. I may order some more for just them, but I hate having one more thing to clutter my tiny laundry room. Does anyone know why Charlies would fade and Cheer wouldn't? What would be in Charlies that would fade, but not in Cheer? S

When I first read your post I thought of using a deeper golden color that mimics the cabinet color. I think it would give a lot of height to the cabinets and integrate the look. The white appliances will still work with the white door and trim that is there. Once I painted a one-wall cabin kitchen all light blue, including the space above the cabinets, the backsplash and the back door, door trim and all the one-wall in the same color. Other than the countertops, everything on that one wall was painted blue. Before, the kitchen looked squat and off-center. After painting it all out, it looked tall and larger and "of a piece". I really like how it changed that dinky little off-centered toad of a kitchen into a bigger, taller, more planned look. Your daughter's kitchen is large, so no problem there, but I think it would benefit from the added illusion of height and streamlining by painting the walls in the golden color of the cabinets.

Hi Scrappy25, I'm not sure how tall the soffits were but they seemed huge! We took down two soffits. One soffit was in a wall that we took out (now it's an archway and a peninsula). What you see now is just trim - we just ordered some stuff and played around with what would look best above the cabinetry. I definitely knew I wanted top of the molding to match the rest of the house, so the carpenter recreated the original molding for the new space - we just needed to fill a small gap (since the cabinets were semi but not custom),so that's when we played around with other molding pieces. The space between the top of the cabinets and the ceiling is nothing compared to the soffits that were there before. The house is 1940 - so nothing is even. So everything was a challenge! However, we had to leave the soffit above the sink - I just had the carpenter make the soffit itself smaller - then we added trim over the soffit above the sink. That's why the two walls look different if you're really staring at them. But most people come to the house and just love the overall kitchen. I'm really happy with how it turned out - we did the best we could with what we had, under a certain budget. It's always a game of give-and-take! The hood - I believe it's the AK2500S Zephyr Power Series Hurricane 30" Under Cabinet Hood. God luck, and happy kitchen planning!

I've thought so much about these comments since last night, but only now have time to respond. I think it is appalling for anyone to use the term "white" as the cause of these shootings. These are not white teens going to schools with large minority populations and shooting them. They are usually their own schools, filled with students just like themselves. This is NOT a racial issue! Lord knows we have enough of them, but this is NOT one of them. Leave it out of the discussion! I am absolutely in favor of stronger gun control laws, but that will only stop more guns being out there IN THE FUTURE. At this point in time, I see no possible way to legally remove the guns already out there, or legally make owning them illegal. We tried Prohibition with liquor; it was a failure. We required that all citizens turn in their gold - no private ownership of gold; that was a failure. Those that own guns are not going to hand them over, and the lawsuits would go on until the next millennium. This does NOT mean we should not try to stop further guns being out there and being so easily accessible. We should all be writing our Congressmen and telling them to vote agains the NRA-backed "permit to carry" being universal in all states. It's a HORRIBLE idea! What concerns me the most, is why is this happening. Why is it happening predominantly in the US? Please don't tell me it's because we elected Trump - most of these shootings started before he was even on The Apprentice. Dislike him if you will, but he is not the cause of school shootings. Yes, the availability of guns is a problem and must be addressed, but guns HAVE always been available in many, many areas. As someone above mentioned, they were even brought to school My husband taught in HS in rural Maine from 1993-2003, and the school parking lot was filled with pick-up trucks with gun racks, with rifles in the racks. So what IS different. I am aware that various studies have not always shown a connection between violent video games and acting out violence. But surely it does de-sensitize one to violence and that cannot possibly be good. We do know that more and more young children are being diagnosed with Obsessive Defiant Disorder. There may be some linkage to ADHD as well. While the causes are unknown, there is some powerful clues. There are Genetic influences. ODD tends to occur in families with a history of ADHD, substance abuse and other mental health issues. There are also Prenatal factors - mother's use of substances during pregnancy and other problems. Then there are Nuerobiological factors. We don't know what causes these. There are Social-cognitive factors - children responsible in inappropriate ways to many things. And there are Environmental factors, i.e. negative parenting practices. Poor parent-child attachment, dysfunctional family, inconsistent discipline, poor parental monitoring and modeling, neglect. While these may be often be found in areas of low socioeconomic status, it can (and does!) occur anywhere. Children with ODD are at far higher risk of moving on to a Conduct Disorder. Some develop this in early childhood; others in the teen years. The prognosis for such children is poor; Twenty-five to forty percent of children with CD will eventually reach a diagnosis of Antisocial Personality Disorder in adulthood. Those in juvenile detention facilities have a rate of 23% - 87% diagnosis of CD, and the adult prison population is filled with those who have APD. These are the children who are committing these school shootings. We know that the Columbine killers clearly had poor parental monitoring. How many children could have an arsenal in the garage or their bedroom and their parents be unaware of it? Really? The boy is FL and his brother were adopted. Their mother regularly called the police to "give them a talking to" as she found them difficult to handle. Did their birth mother(s) use substances during their pregnancies? Most likely. And her parenting was clearly inconsistent. We have a major breakdown of the family unit in this country. Not just in poor families (and it is horrible there), but even in middle/upper middle class families. I hear parents talking all the time, and I'm astounded at how indifferent many are to the needs of their children. EDUCATED parents talking this way. It's either "helicopter" or "neglect/indifference". Parents tend to think that once the child is in school, little supervision is needed; by the teen years, they get little. As one neighbor told me, "Once they get their car, they pretty much go and come as they please!" Really? Mine didn't. My grandchildren don't. They are still CHILDREN and need supervision! We will not solve the problem of school shootings until we IDENTIFY THE PROBLEM, and the problem is not just guns. We need to do some serious soul searching as to why our children are being so abysmally failed by so many parents today.