While geokid's version has some pluses, I'd want to see the view when I was sitting up in bed. Also, I would move the door to the bedroom down the hallway some to retain a corner in the bedroom for chair or dresser or something. Not sure about the transom either as if someone's using the bathroom at night it can light up the bedroom... I know you may know, but just want to be sure, in "annie's version" the tub goes the other way so the plumbing is near the window, so when you sit in the tub, you are looking at the view, not the room. The shelved wall is pretty, but PITA to clean....reminds me of my grandmother who had something similar with floor to ceiling dishes. I'd opt for the view from the tub over the shelves. You could always do that as a mirror surround by the sinks or behind the sitting chair or at the blank wall by the closet.

It's never too early for Christmas in the woods, kiwi. But seriously, i do understand the irritation for some people at the constant stretching of the season, mtn and Annie and others' objections to trotting it out early here are not unreasonable. (Although I think mtn should be at least relieved that there was no red on the tree, her most unfavorite color, lol) And I finally got the vintage 1959s tree topper on the tree and it is perfect if I do say so myself. I waited like a stalker until the right one came up in ebay and got it for less than $12!! Now I just have to dig out the Burberryish plaid ribbon and tuck it in. Handy Guy is much better than I am at that though, so I may save the job for him. edited to replace sideways picture This post was edited by kswl on Fri, Oct 10, 14 at 13:24

I hate it when life gets in the way of shopping. I try to have a well-balanced lifed during gardening season: spending half my time gardening and the other half shopping for the garden. Well, I'm just kidding about that, but Tim would say that we do seem to spend an inordinate amount of time at this time of the year looking for this or that, and he's probably right. I like having all the right supplies, tools, etc. on hand before the hot and heavy part of the garden season starts. I hate having to leave the garden to go buy something that I should have sitting in the potting shed.

Probably like most people my most intense gardening started out with buying a house. We tore out & re-did the inside from stem to stern, decorated it to our liking and took the same approach outside--we tore out & decorated that as well for curb appeal, approaching it as a sort of an outdoor room arranged to look just so. I was a neat-nik to the point of trimming plants with scissors, mulching for perfect looking neatness around chosen plants, obsessive weeding to keep up a perfect deep green, weed free 'carpet' to go around the 'furniture' and keeping it all watered ---which meant sprinklers running every other day most of the time in summer. Meanwhile, I was constantly buying more pretty plants which I arranged and rearranged or discarded as my taste changed or when I got bored. The beds kept growing in size. Perfection and lots of color was my goal along with a desire to impress passers-by if I'm being honest about it. Sooner or later I'd get bored with just about anything I bought but often I just wanted some new piece of flash that caught my eye which gave me an excuse to go plant shopping (again) which I loved to do back then. Then in 2006 we took a trip to New Mexico. I loved the wild plants growing in the countryside and the SW look of peoples yards and it hit me hard how trite and artificial my own landscape and most of the others around Oklahoma City were. None of them reflected where we lived. It was as if we had no local pride or sense of place. I remember thinking even the weeds are pretty in New Mexico. That was the first thing that got me focused on 'weeds' or more to the point, natives. When we got home I started ripping out the next day. I enjoyed doing this once I started because I was so motivated and disgusted with the whole thing and I had a focus unlike any I'd ever had. As the massive piles stacked up by the curb the yard soon became totally bare. I now had a clean slate. A wider world opened up as the country-side became the example to follow for what I wanted to see on my own small space of land. I began reading books about the dust bowl, early settlers and inevitably drifted into ecological issues and the shrinking grasslands. I felt a stronger connection to my own location where I'd grown up and always lived. I was able to see the simple beauty of it and my appreciation grew. I fell in love with prairie grasses, they reminded me of the small towns of my childhood and a strong sense of nostalgia set in. I also noticed with alarm the amount of forestation and urban sprawl happening all around me and our lack of appreciation for what is native in our area. Each new development ate up more of the prairie which was quickly replaced with green bermuda lawns & sprinkler systems along with beds filled with imported trees, shrubs, perennial and alien ornamental grasses, usually Miscanthus. Each new addition displayed a boring and expected sameness. Foreign trees are naturalizing further into the grasslands all around these additions like weeds. Around the same time, the city began urban renewal downtown and around the capitol where they were mass planting prairie grasses to serve as decorative plants. The effect was refreshing and surprisingly modern looking. Several post modern homes were being built and industrial buildings were also being refitted into high end modern housing. All of these tend to opt for a prairie type of landscape which means lots of texture and sunlight effects. The result is an spacious, open, pared down, clean, modern look and distinctly Oklahoma. It was becoming 'cool and with it' to go this route but it shows people are beginning to think of the environment. Oklahoma is a rough place to garden where nature seems uncooperative if you try to go against it. With the trend of using native plants and grasses it seems we might be coming full circle and learning about self sustaining landscaping. For me, its more interesting and appealing. I didn't start out with ideas or concerns about ecology but that change I made back in 2006 lead me there very quickly.