Congratulations! I followed your previous post and know the frustration of following directions and coming up with...nada. There's a satisfying sense of accomplishment when that eureka moment occurs and the problem is solved. Sorry your moment came at the untimely hour of 2:37 A.M. - hard to share the joy with anyone at that hour! This forum is great, isn't it? So many helpful, knowledgeable, and patient contributors. It's the first one I click on each A.M.

We get a daily newspaper and it has both a cross word and a sodoku puzzle. [I do both in pencil by necessity.] Once in a while, I'll try the cross word puzzle, but most of the time, i don't get more that half way through. Our puzzle editor is too obtuse with his definitions. The sodoku puzzles are fun. In our paper, the difficulty lever begins with the easiest on Monday and then progressing to the most difficult on Saturday. I can solve the Monday thru Wednesday puzzles in reasonabe time, and then the snags begin to appear on Thursday. I can solve the Thur - Sat puzzles, but have to resort to drastic measures becasue these require guesses after the obvious numbers have been filled in. I usually don't bother with the Friday and Saturday puzzle because those are too time comsuming. I make use of the copier built inot my printer to solve the harder puzzles. After all the obvious numbers have been filled in, I lightly pencil in all possibilities in the remaining squares and then make several copies. I begin experimenting on a copy starting by circling a guess and marking out all eliminations this guess makes. If i can proceed through the entire puzzle ending with a solution, then I have guessed correctly. Most of the time, this does not happen and I must return to a nother copy and make a different guess. Continue making guesses on fresh copies until you find the solution. Hint: Start the first guess in a square that contains only 2 possibilities. If that one does not work out, then return to that square and try the other possibility. Often, this is the quickest way to find a solution. However, I have encountered puzzles where both guesses have ended in blind alleys which forces one to try a different square.

I have been fooling with Benje's design in the IKEA planner. Edited to add: Sorry for the duplicate - I can't seem to remove it.) You want hickory doors? You can put 3rd party doors on IKEA's boxes and still get their Blum hardware and soft-close, full-extension drawers. I've also been playing with Cabinetnow.com, one of those 3rd party door-makers who are conversant with the IKEA switcheroo. They also have a cost generator on their site. When I input the door and drawer sizes for the Benje's-kitchen-fronts (with the addition of a booth with seats fashioned from over-refrigerator cabinets), the cost is very similar to the price of IKEA's Grimslov medium-brown. ($11,000, which includes the cabinets, hardware, counters, handles, sink and stove, fridge, microhood and paneled dishwasher. (IKEA's sales are 20% off, but with the fairly recent debut of their replacement line, Sektion, these sales are on hiatus til ?) Granted, the Cabinetnow doors are unfinished. Vsalzmann took this approach (IKEA + cabinetnow.com) with her kitchen and used tung oil, which she describes as "So simple."

I go to a handful of different places almost every day and print out crossword puzzles. NYT puzzles will cost ya for their daily but on Monday' you can get 3 free ones from their archives. The "Universal" crossword is in a lot of different papers daily. I go to The Washington Post, USA Today and LA Times all the time.