HI Erin! Welcome to the wonderful fun of gardening and also, bless you in your new home! Where are you located? Are you thinking of only planting hostas or are you thinking of having a few other plants in there with them? Some contrast and especially color when the hostas are not blooming makes everything look really nice. Hostas are quite happy to have friends among them. My lot is .1 acre and that includes the house. So I do not not get hundreds of hostas or anything else (except slugs). It is pretty shady from my neighbors' trees though the bed in front of the house is in full sun. That is where daylilies and irises go. But I do have at least 25 cultivars of hostas and am planning some more. The advantage to a small garden is you have to plan what you put in it -- or else be prepared to pull out things to give away so you can make room for new acquisitions. And divisions from your older plants! The fun is, you don't get everything at once that you will ever have. Wait a while and put things in a few at a time (annuals will do to fill in places) and then you can have the pleasure of learning about new species and cultivars and acquiring them as the years go by. You will get different plants, hostas or otherwise, from various sources and they will always remind you of the person who gave it to you, swapped with you, or the trip you took when you bought one or another plant(s). I like to have some color spotted here & there so I use impatiens (I can hear the perennial people groaning) and I also have some Heron's Pirouette perennial begonias---these get about 2.5-3" tall when they bloom and have long lasting scapes ( flower stalks), arching gracefully --- here, from Aug till frost. In May, there is old fashioned bleeding heart -- both white and pink/white. These die back in the heat of summer so the hostas, which are getting big, fill in the bare spots the bleeding hearts left. I have a few liriope here & there because they are OK with dry shade & tree roots, and they are not boring if you only use a couple. You can get them with several shades of variegated foliage, and white or medium or dark blue flowers. And they bloom in very late summer/fall when not much else does, in the shady garden. I live in NJ overlooking the Delaware R just north of Trenton. I use astilbe, too--from white to pink to deep red frothy flowers in late spring and early summer. They are also beautiful with the hostas. Right now there are crocuses that have just opened yesterday (when it was sunny) and there will be squills and grape hyacinths, and daffodils are in the sunnier spots. I don't bother with tulips---though I love them, they are an expensive way to feed deer. I have lily of valley under the Norway spruce tree (which has had its lower branches removed to give sun to the bed under it) this is a rather dry shade bed---however the trunk of the spruce is ringed with Gold Standard hostas that are quite happy. The bed gets compost thrown over it every spring and it has sweet woodruff in there along with the hostas, and little spring bulbs such as crocuses & squills, and bigger ones ie English bluebells. Lily of the valley would like to take over the world, but there is easy way to stop it---dig some out. After it blooms, so you can have the wonderful flowers! I try to always have something blooming somewhere in the yard. It does not have to be a lot, just a bit--some white or pink flowered thing next to a dark leaved hosta brightens the corner. I have scilla Hispanica which is "wood hyacinths" -- you can get them in pink, white or blue, and they are very shade tolerant. They will bloom in May (here) and do very well next to hostas too. When the hosta leaves get bigger, the scilla is dying back for the summer. In our yard we have red shale which breaks down to clay in some parts, and what the locals call "the brown sand" in the other areas. In one little lot! Some kind of interesting geology was going on here a long time ago! We now have dark black soil over both, after years of digging in manure, leaves, & compost. You can ameliorate clay quite a lot with gypsum. We dig our yard's leaves right into our beds, around the plants, in fall. When we make a new bed, which we did a lot of after we got the new septic system, we take three years to do this digging, instead of planting things right away. The soil in those beds is wonderful. We also have a compost bin in the back corner---this is not rocket science and do not let compost hobbyists scare you! All you have to do is make a circle a yard or more across with sturdy wire, and throw in the leaves, weeds, and the non-meat kitchen scraps. Also grass clippings if you do not put weed killer and poisons on the lawn. Kitchen stuff meaning plant material such as peels, rinds, stems, leftover salad or other veggies that waited too long in the fridge to be eaten, and cut up toilet paper rollers. Turn it twice a year and when you turn it, take the well-composted stuff out & use it in your garden. When the ground is warm in summer, we just take the kitchen compost bowl out & dig the stuff right into the garden next to the plants. It breaks down very quickly in summer and the nutrition goes right into the plants. You said you have children---by all means, set aside a place for their own garden! Especially if you can make it in a sunny area. Let them plant veggies (then they will eat them) and make it easy ones such as lettuce and beans. You can grow beans as a little tent to save space. Or you can make a taller "tepee" with poles and leave an opening for the kids to crawl in under the beans. You can take a potato from the farmer's market (the organic stand; it won't have been sprayed with anti-sprouting stuff) and cut it up so the pieces have eyes. Just stick them in the ground a few feet apart. Then the kids can have their own potato plants. Well, you have heard enough from me! Once again, welcome to years & years of great fun!

If it's in checked luggage,I think it's O.K. - they just don't want you trying to stab anyone w/ embroidery scissors in flight.... ...but seriously, all appropriate info should be available @ the airline's website - I do not necessarily rely on the accuracy of info from airline employees, since rules keep changing & not everyone is on the same page.

Thanks so much for the suggestions and advice!! Chicoryflower .. no laughing here :) If I was in a different house, I'd snap up some vintage MCM metal cabs and have them painted at an auto body shop in a super fun color. I love colorful kitchens and MCM design, your mockup is great! Mclark and Littledog, a base cabinet that had dividers to hold baking sheets, pot lids, etc is a super idea! That would be an excellent use of space. Thanks so much for the suggestion, I'm going to investigate if some of the 'after market' places ( like rev-a-shelf ) have a comparable unit. Live wire oak and Kabergs, the refrigerator and dishwasher will both be stainless, so I'm hoping the hood will help tie it all together. I have thought that if I get the hood put up and don't like the look against the stove, then I would have it painted by an auto body shop. We know a guy that does great work and is very reasonable. Unless anything changes between now and then, what I'm planning for the kitchen is to use IKEA cabs. We will be doing some carpentry work to them, so they look a little more custom. I've seen the Tidaholm painted and they look just like frameless shaker cabinets, we'll be painting ours white. I'd love to have custom shaker cabinets, with inset doors, they would go better with our older home. My DH is too busy to make them though and after pricing them out it's just not what I want to spend right now. I'm fairly certain we'll be using soapstone counters, we are in the process of looking into Alberene soapstone up in Virginia. We'll probably buy/pick up honed slabs from them, transport them home and then we'll(DIY)fabricate them on site. I already have a soapstone farm sink here waiting, it was a super good deal off of e-bay. The floors will be salvaged heart pine that matches the rest of the down stairs. That's going to be a bit of work, we need to take up layers, upon layers of old floors, put down plywood and start fresh. Right now the kitchen is the highest part of the downstairs. *LOL* We've been working on and off on a Mahogany unit that will be a storage/pantry area. Here's the doors just set in place ( they aren't hinged, just setting there, so the reveals are/look off ) we still have to make the sides of the unit. This is just the raw wood too, it hasn't been treated with a top coat yet. We'll probably waterlox it and let it age naturally, no stain. Cruddy picture, but ..

I think it depends on the airline. But I have heard that plastic circular needles are more likely to be approved.