To say I love hoop houses or high tunnels, is an understatement. I believe that we need to produce as much of our own food locally, when we can. No you can't grow tomatoes in January (without lots of heat and other stuff) but why not grow what you can. I have 6 high tunnels. 4 stationary ones and 2 movable ones. In a single year we will have over 5,000 square feet under plastic. If I have my way (I hope I do) I will put up one more this late summer/fall and replace my smallest one. Three years ago and $200 I built my first two tunnels. They were 12 by 18 and 8 by 12. I still have the 12 by 18. I took down the other one to make room for my 18.5 by 45. I build my own tunnels. They cost around $600 to build. I can't say enough about them. I think everyone should have one. At least on on every block. Yes, a 12 by 18 is enough space to feed a family. In addition to this, we have about another 3/4 of an acre we "Farm". Our produce feeds our family of 6 and I sell at 3-4 Farmers Markets a week. By the way in our zone 5, we are harvesting, zucchini, cucumbers, Pickling cucumbers, bell peppers, cherry tomatoes, lettuce, beets, chard, bok choy, carrots and onions from our tunnels. Pretty unbelievable with the spring we have had. Cool and wet. Check out our blog, I added the link below. Click on High tunnels on the right and page down. You will see all our tunnels. Jay Here is a link that might be useful: High Farming Blog

I am so happy to have come across this post! I purchased a condo 4 years ago and am now selling it. I live on the 3rd floor (1 bedroom) however the unit below me is considered one unit and is a 2 floor unit (2 bedrooms). My downstairs neighbor and I started off rocky and since then she's been constantly complaining about excessive noise from my unit. Stomping, slamming doors, using appliances etc in the late hours of the night. It's come to the point where she's escalating to the HOA BOD- however i'm also now selling my unit because I purchased a single family home in a new development and in order to save and put myself out of the misery of living with my neighbor will just live elsewhere while waiting for the new house to be built. If I had known what I know now I would not have opted to purchase a condo on the 3rd floor (in a 4 floor building). 1) Living on the 3rd floor I received noise complaints from my neighbor below me while I also had to endure noise from the person above me. (Being the understanding neighbor that I was I never once complained to the person above me since they have children so I opted for earplugs instead). Mind you I live in a one bedroom and so I never purposely tried to create noise but some things are inevitable like having to walk to my bathroom. I refuse to tiptoe in my own house but I assure you i'm not stomping i'm walking regularly! 2) As many people mentioned you cannot pick your neighbors! I'm going to be honest my community is filled with some downright nasty neighbors. If it's not me dealing with my crazy neighbor there's constantly complaints and random letters on our community corkboard. People complaining about how people park, how people throw away trash, how long the water is shut off for construction. People literally use a notice as a form of communication and will write on it and form conversations on that one piece of paper. 3) Your condo might look/seem nice now but you never know what it'll look like 20-30 years from now. Although i've only lived in my place for 4 years I have to say that I was shocked at the lack of care for the building. My boyfriend got stuck in the elevator once for an hour with a cancer patient in our building on a very hot day and there is barely any ventilation in the elevator and no air conditioning! I later learned from a neighbor that our elevator is the wrong type of elevator for our building. Additionally I think the materials used for our building are just downright poor. I can hear the person in the unit above me snoring. I can't tell the person above me to stop snoring, but that's just to show how it could be a mix of bad materials. At least with an apartment you know it's a somewhat temporary situation.. if you hate it you could potentially move elsewhere with not much risk. Honestly before purchasing my single family home I even considered a townhouse as an upgrade to my condo. I figured that sharing sidewalls with individuals is a lot less worse than sharing floors/ceilings which I think are just terrible and usually amplify noise. At the end of the day i'm happy to be moving away from this situation and moving to a place where I can run the dishwasher and use the overnight cycle at night without someone berating me! It came to the point where my neighbor's requests were aggressive and rude and made me feel uncomfortable living in my own condo.

BTW this is the interior of the Maytag dishwasher I had; made in the early '90s (from a pic i found online of a similar model). Note that the lower rack is configured for glasses, with fold-down cup racks on both sides; and the top rack for large plates and cookware so that loading/unloading heavy items don't require reaching down, a boon to anyone with back pain: They revisited that layout in the mid-2000s with their 3-rack dishwashers sold under the Maytag and Jenn-Air brands. Some of them had height adjustments for both the upper and middle racks; if the top rack was lowered, it would have ample height for dinner plates on the right side, and the center rack (like the top rack) was shaped so it could hold either glasses or plates as needed. What's more, both the top and center racks were terraced (slanted left to right) but in in opposite directions, so it could hold large dinner plates in the top rack (at the right) and the center rack (at the left) at the same time. And there was still enough height left for a lower rack mainly for utensils, but with the center rack raised there was enough room on the right side of the lowest rack to hold saucepans and the like. A brilliant design I wish they still made, but these were discontinued shortly before the remains of Maytag was bought out by Whirlpool, after which both Maytag and Jenn-Air appliances were replaced by Whirlpool-based designs. This photo shows the racks loaded with the glasses on top and large plates underneath, but with the top rack lowered it could be arranged in the reverse as with the Miele DW i have now. This post was edited by lee676 on Sun, Nov 17, 13 at 20:02

Honestly, yes, taft, just get it out any way you can. Seriously--you are in charge, not the stuff. That's my "Take It Out Back and Smash It With a Hammer" philosophy. Here's another one of my theories: I call it my "Stop Me Before I Kill Again" theory. It will all end up in the landfill anyway. Eventually. It will wear out, get broken, become so out of date nobody wants it. Everything. Seriously--everything. It all goes in the garbage eventually. Just like--we all die. What the end will be is never in question. It is just a matter of time. And, more important, it is a matter of how much good or evil we do (or the stuff does) along the way. Right now that stuff in boxes is evil. Remember your words: "I was feeling so hemmed in by the stuff in this house I couldn't take it anymore. " That's evil--that's what that is. That stuff is a little (or big!) piece of evil in your life. You can't move; your home doesn't feel welcoming; you look at it and feel horrible about yourself. That's evil. Seriously, it is. The stuff is crying out: Stop me before I kill again! So, you have two choices: rehabilitation or execution. If you can rehabilitate it (give it away to someone who will use it; get it into a recycling bin; sell it for money) easily, that's a sensible move. But will it rehabilitate? Will the cost--emotional cost, time cost--be prohibitive? Do you want to find someone who takes "stuff" and sorts through it to find stuff they can sell on eBay? (an eBay entrepreneur?) Do you want to give it to a thrift shop somewhere, so they can see if they want anything? Do you want to pay your college-age/teenage son/neighbor (or maybe your neighbor's cleaning lady) to go through it looking for stuff like money or photos? But all that sounds like a lot of work, with little guarantee it will be viable. Remember, the stuff will continue to work evil while you sort through it. So just toss it. If you're pretty sure you won't lose a $10,000 bearer bond, or something, just throw it out. (I found $40 in cash in a box I sorted through--but it was just one box of sorting. If I had 18 boxes, and someone said, "would you pay $40 to get rid of them?" my answer would have been yes. So you might not need to be that concerned about what's in them.) Good luck! OH! Here's one other option to consider: Let this forum be your discipline. If you want to, you could decide that every day you will eliminate one box. Every day. (Or, OK, every Saturday, you'll eliminate 3 of them, minimum.) Post here, and tell us how you're doing. (Or, make that a real-world situation, which will be more powerful, even: If you've got a good friend, ask her to come help you sort through 5 boxes every Saturday morning; you'll buy donuts if she'll help you. Even if all she does it sit there and say to you, if only by her presence: "Hey, I gave up my Saturday morning to help you get rid of boxes. Get off your bum and get rid of some boxes; don't waste my time." Don't have a friend? Hire a cleaning-lady-type person for a Saturday morning, several weeks in a row, and get boxes, trash bags, and directions to a donation place in place before you start.) Go get 'em, taft!