I had an epiphany over the weekend. By virtue of a happy design accident, the back side granite piece for the tub deck is nearly identical in size to the front piece that the fabricator screwed up. And because I'm super anal about balance, the single hole drilled in it for the handshower is exactly in plane with the cold faucet handle hole on the front piece. I realized that I could move the back piece to the front and all it needs is 2 more holes and an edge polished. I took the pieces back to the fabricator yesterday and they got me hooked up. There was enough scrap left to recut the back piece with a seam down the middle so it's less conspicuous and easier to level out. I just got back from picking up the new pieces, and it's all going to work out. No seam on the front edge, and I can live with the one in the back. Problem solved! I was pretty fired up for a while, but the shop took care of me in the end. They even knocked some bucks of the top of my already good deal, and the lady that runs the shop was exteremely apologetic about the whole thing. She told me my next project was on her! Maybe the fireplace hearth needs a facelift :) Thanks again for listening. Joe

The leaf damage is from rose slugs. The bugs on your bud are aphids. Aphids can be hand squished or knocked off with a strong spray of water from a hose. Or wait a bit and a predator will come and eat them they don't do much damage. The rose slugs can be found on the bottoms of leaves and are a green worm. Predators will come for these as well. Or you can hunt for them and squish. I could not find the rose slugs for the longest time after reading about them here. Once I found my first one it became mush easier. They are about the color of the leaf vein on the bottom.

It sounds like you are not fully informed about some of the issues with construction in your area. Exterior - definitely a big one. The arched windows, the round column, the frilly embellishments, the classic rough stucco - we're not big fans of. Lyfia, agree these could be updated. You might check with your local zoning folks first. The neighborhood I moved from last year specifically disallowed the type of architecture you want to change to. The neighborhood was known as a "bungalow" area. You could build anything you wanted to behind an early 20th century bungalow facade that met certain criteria. They sell for $200 to $500 per square ft, so they are out of reach to many people. Still people buy them as blower uppers. People do not come to that neighborhood expecting to find an eclectic array of houses. Thus the housing value for the neighborhood would be expected to decline if you started building odd looking homes. If your neighborhood does not have any architectural design restrictions, others in the neighborhood would forever point at your modern house as, "that house," and not in a friendly way. foundation - cheaper pier and beam type - floors creaking, some sagging. We wish this was a sturdier more modern basement type foundation. Pier and beam can be cheap, but some of the most expensive homes in the world are built on pier and beam. Pier and beam might be the only possible foundation depending on earthquake prevalence. If your floors creak and sag, that's a remodeling issue, not a rebuilding issue. What is modern about basements? I could probably count on two hands the number of basement houses in California. Something about earthquakes makes them impractical. truss roof - low 8 feet ceilings throughout the house. We cry a little every time we experience nice high ceilings. Truss roofs can be built above any room height. I think the room height is more of a problem for you than the structural design. Square footage - small for the family. We'd love a bigger 2n'd story - not just a room on top of the garage. Small rooms and bathrooms. 4 bedrooms, 3 baths in 1590 sq feet. We could do with a better floor plan. Unbelievable!!! I thought 3-2 in 1800 square feet was cramped. Pitched roof - we've grown up in flat roofed houses with roofs that we could walk out on to. We'd love to have that again - and a partial terrace would be phenomenal. Just curious what part of the world you grew up in? You're not originally from California, are you? Dated interiors - floors, floor boards, moldings, tile floors - this I feel would be an easy change Sure. This is last one is all remodeling, but you have other issues. If you are absolutely in love with this location, I would suggest looking for a more run down house in the neighborhood, buy that, and redo. You have a serious multiplier effect going on. If you buy a 1500 square foot house at $300 psf, and remodel/rebuild it to 3000, square feet, you likely still have something in the range of $300 psf in value. That's what is going on in the bungalow neighborhood I mentioned above. Most of the psf cost goes into kitchens and baths, so adding larger bedrooms and family rooms is relatively low cost.

Rebecca, I am happy your drought is gone too, but sorry this dreary weather contributes to your aches and pains. I am hoping for warmer, drier weather for all of us, but not sure when we are going to get it. January always seems like the dreariest month to me. Stock will grow here, but it is pretty picky, and I have better results from it when I plant it in October or November which is the same time here in my area that you can plant pansies, flowering kale, flowering cabbage, dianthus, and snapdragons. Stock is not only a cool-season plant, but it is a bit pickier about the cool weather than some other cool-season plants seem to be. For example, dianthus goes in and out of bloom cycles here pretty much year-round, whether the temperatures are high are low. Stock doesn't do that. Stock blooms when the weather is cool, period. I believe it has to have temperatures in the 60s in order to set flowers and bloom. Once your temperatures are hotter, then it is pretty much done. If you can find some transplants in flower or ready to flower and plant them in early Spring, you can get a few weeks to a few months of bloom from it if the weather cooperates. I like stock but don't plant it often in Spring as we get too hot too early down here most years. It also tolerates cold less well than the other plants I mentioned above, so may need to be covered up in the winter and early spring on nights going very far below 32 degrees. It will tolerate some light frosts but not real heavy ones. Lupines? I haven't tried the ones that grow in northern parts of the country as I don't think they'd do well in our hot summers but I grow the kind of lupines that God gave us....Lupinus texensis, aka Texas bluebonnets. They either are perennial here or reseed in our clay, and some years we get big stands of them and other years we have smaller stands. Our clay really is too dense for them here at our house and I knew that when I planted them, but I figured that maybe if I was foolish enough to sow the seeds and plant them here, then maybe they would be foolish enough to grow and bloom at least a little bit....and they do. I also have grown the red-flowered variety of Lupinus texensis called Alamo Fire and it does pretty well here. In our area, all kinds of Texas bluebonnets do better from seed sown in the fall than in the spring. The bluebonnet seeds have a hard shell and sprout sporadically over a period of a couple of years. I do see fairly large (maybe one gallon, maybe two gallon) pots of Russell hybrid type lupines in stores each spring. They have them around the same time they have delphiniums in bloom in large pots, so maybe in April. To me, these are the kinds of things you buy, bring home and plant for instant impact, and you do so knowing they are likely to be relatively short-lived in our heat. If you don't expect them to thrive and flourish in our heat and can be content just to enjoy them while they last, I don't see anything wrong with buying them and planting them. I suppose they could be a big disappointment if a person bought them thinking they would bloom all summer. Yet, you never know---what if we had a cooler than average summer and they did bloom and survive? Cool summers aren't common here, but we had one in 2015. Nancy, I've grown Drummond's Phlox here and it did okay, but not well enough that I continued growing it. Drummond's Phlox is one of the smaller varieties and it needs well-drained sandy soil (which I really cannot give it). As for the taller garden type phlox, there's a handful of heirloom types that thrive here---we had someone in our neighborhood in Ft Worth whose home was just surrounded by the old magenta-flowering one grown back in the 1960s and prior. I don't know the name of it. There's a few of the taller garden phlox, like the variety "David", bred to be mildew-tolerant, but I haven't grown any of those. Jennifer, We have a fenced chicken run. We always have had one. I wouldn't have a chicken coop without one. I believe our run with the only coop now in use (we have four coops, and each has a fully enclosed chicken run) is 10' x 20' and it is fully covered in sturdy fencing, including a fence type roof. The chickens are fine when they are in it, but they hate being confined because they are used to free-ranging. I think that if they never were allowed to free-range, they wouldn't know what they were missing and they'd be content to be in the chicken run. We have lost more chickens to predators in the last 5 years than we did in the first 15 years, and I'm just done with that. If we buy more chickens, they are not going to be allowed to free range because it really is just setting them up to eventually become some predator's meal. Our predator problem probably is 20 times worse now than it was when we moved here. As land a few miles from us continues to develop, the wildlife gets pushed upriver to us. We have to change how we manage our chickens, or there's no point in having them any more. Tim is gone from home roughly 14 hours a day on work days, so he barely sees the chickens except on weekends and he is out of touch with our current reality with regards to the predator issues. I wish we were in a nice, quiet semi-rural neighborhood where chickens can free range and be relatively safe within their own yard, but we live in a wildlife jungle. It would help if I could convince him to fence our entire yard, but he hates fences with a passion. I don't know how to have chickens any more without an 8' tall fence around the whole yard. Dawn