Ditto, no selling at the Fort Worth area swap. One lady showed up one time and wanted to sell her plants, but when we told her we weren't there to buy anything, she packed up her kit bag and went home. If you log on the Gardening in Arkansas forum and go to the trading forum you can just post a notice that you would like to have a swap in your area and see how many people are interested. You may be surprised and if you only have 5-10 people respond, go with it, a small swap is still a swap and you still get stuff for your garden for free. Ours started out several years ago with Sylvia doing that, and it is always a big event. We reserve a space at a centrally located public park, preferably an area with a pavilion and a grill. One couple has agreed to always bring refreshments for everyone in exchange for plants and seeds. Then if anyone has something they want to bring extra to eat they bring enough for at least 30 people. Then we set a date, usually a Saturday and people start listing what they plan to bring. We have a lot of "pre-swaps" on the garden web and then there are on the spot swaps after you get there and find people have brought stuff that they didn't list that you want, like tools, books and other fun things. One time someone brought gardening aprons with the GW logo embroidered on them. One person always brings great soaps and bath salts that she makes at home. Some people will bring baked goods to trade for plants if they don't have enough plants to swap. Another person made cute personalized name tags for everyone. Once you get one of these swap things going you will find that a lot of the same people will attend year after year (oh and we do it twice a year too, Spring and Fall) so we all get to be very good friends, even visiting each others homes and gardens and sharing plants and info on a regular basis. My humble opinion of the swap is that you should not ante up a dime for anything, otherwise you will be expected to continue to cover the costs and you will eventually lose out big time. Go cheap, spend nothing, and you will have a fun get-together with other gardeners who share interests in the best way, freely. This way you will never feel used or abused and in no danger of having to make it into some kind of business. Check out your public parks, maybe a church yard or a school yard will allow you to set up for a couple hours on a Saturday morning. If you plan to help out your humane society that can certainly happen too, they would have to be willing to set up at whatever location you choose but if they want to make money by selling something, you may again wind up obligated in some way. Personally, I'd keep those kinds of activities separate from a free plant swap. Cheryl

Our house has a similar situation. It's 1900 sf, built in the 1890's, has some blown in insulation in the walls (we only know this because we gutted the bathroom and found it - this room will have regular batt insulation in the walls and ceilings), has the original windows but triple track storms. The old oil fired boiler is 199k BTU and our oil bills are completely heinous - we used about $650 worth of oil for the month of December. I can't imagine what our bills would have been for a house 50% larger. Just from a reality check standpoint, there is no way a house the size of ours requires the absolutely largest residential boiler available (there may be some slightly larger but in general, around 200k is as big as they get). Our old boiler does short cycle too, it's loud enough that you can hear it. Even in the dead of winter with single digits at night it cycles on and off. We are probably running somewhere in the 60-70% efficiency range also. Everyone who has quoted for us has universally said "WHOA that's a HUGE boiler for your house." After evaluating all of our options, we are going with a modulating/condensing boiler at about half the capacity (maximum) and putting zones into our house. Right now when it is 68 downstairs, it's about 80 degrees in our bedroom - so at a minimum breaking the house down into different zones for upstairs and downstairs should also help - DH works at home during the day and there is no reason to throw all of that extra heat upstairs when no one is there in order to keep downstairs comfortable. For various reasons we are actually going with more zones than that (the way our system was originally piped makes it extremely easy - labor wise it would be just as much to combine them back into one zone as leave them split - and there is a big temperature difference between the various parts of the house we are splitting off) but you might want to check into whether it is possible given your current piping to separate your 2nd floor from your first into separate zones. Between the zoning and the much more efficient boiler, we hope to slash our energy prices. It's NOT a cheap boiler (the cost of the boiler is more than the cost of your boiler + install) but with our old cast iron radiators with relatively cool return, the condensing part will work great, and with us zoning out our house, the modulating part should work great too (it operates at a much lower BTU if the demand isn't there). It also changes the temperature of the water sent out into the system based on the outside temperature, so if it's 50 degrees outside and we want to maintain say 70 inside, it's not necessarily moving 180-190 degree water through the system, so there is savings there too, especially in the shoulder months. We are switching from oil to gas (it would cost us thousands to replace our oil tanks, the real reason we are replacing the boiler - the oil tanks are not long for this world and because there is no longer outside access to the basement it would be a huge job to get the old ones out in pieces and multiple small new ones in and we decided to put that money into a more energy efficient boiler rather than use the same old boiler and just get new oil tanks) so it will be interesting to see the difference in our energy bills. Anyway it took a ton of research and a bunch of time looking at our system and figuring out what was going on to trace out the various loops we have, but I'm glad we put the time into it. We feel confident with the system we have chosen and hope our house will be far more comfortable and energy efficient for the years to come. Energy prices have nowhere to go but up, unfortunately. We are only planning to do this once so figured we'd do it right the first time. The first couple of contractors wanted to put in either a 200k btu boiler to replace the one we have or a 165kbtu boiler calculated by counting radiator fins. As I said before, some of our radiators have about 3x the capacity actually required for comfort in the room so it's kind of silly to oversize in this way because it's just easier to "replace in kind."

"Foundation plantings" are a landscape design convention held over from Victorian times when shielding or disguising bare stone or concrete foundations was popular/necessary and popular landscape architects of that time promoted the idea of 'grounding' the house to the landscape for a more natural look. Like the omnipresent lawn, they may or may not have relevance to today's landscapes. And it is a matter almost entirely of personal taste. Certainly lot sizes have shrunk significantly over the years so that the beds that defined a foundation planting are now so tight and restricted that almost nothing other than annuals and a few perennials fit. That appears to be the case in at least part of the OP's garden, where the concrete walkway only allows a very narrow space for any sort of planting bed. But if the foundation bed is designed to be generously deep enough (a 6' minimum - deeper is better) then it allows for planting some evergreen material (mixed with deciduous if desired) to compliment the house and welcome visitors, provided that it is of proper scale. And if well-designed and with proper consideration to plant selection, foundation plantings pose no issue to either the structure or the foundation. btw, the design lingo now popular for this front of the house planting is 'the entry garden' :-)

My recommendation would not be install a combination boiler. In my opinion it is best to keep it simple and have a separate hot water heater. If you get a traditional 40 or 50 gallon hot water tank then you will have hot water during power outages and have an appliance that will last about 15 years. Are any of the contractors doing a load calculation? If you live an older house there is a good chance your current boiler is over sized. The boiler needs to also be sized by the number of radiators. The basement adds very little heat load if it mostly underground. You should not need to increase the size because you are finishing the basement. If you want good temperature control in the basement then make it a separate zone.