Kween...what a cool idea! The color is just perfect! Is that a "bed bench" in your other photos? That turned out great too! What great junkers we have around here! I get inspired everyday around here! Cait...I don't know how this will work for you in Australia, but try planting beans in with your corn. Beans are a great companion plant for corn cause the beans give the corn extra nitrogen that it likes. It works well for "space saving" gardening as well cause the beans climb up the corn stalks. Maybe it will work for ya. B :)

We tried barely beige in our living room and I didn't like it because of the pinky undertones. Change the bulbs change the paint and then see how you like it. I've got friends who waited a year or more before deciding on a splash. Do everything else - you don't need to finish the splash now to finish your project. You don't need more than a quart of paint - take your samples (counter, cabs and floor) down to the paint store, get them to recommend a couple of colours (tell them about the look you are going for - light and airy right?) take the quarts home and sample away.

1) First up, don't install the hardwoods yet. Three reasons: a) Find out from the manufacturer of the intended hardwoods if cabinets can be installed on top of them or if the floor should be installed around the cabinets. We're installing a floating hardwood floor, and we were told in no uncertain terms not to install the kitchen on top of the floor because it would cause a "pinch point" where the floor could not expand/contract naturally because it was pinned in place by the weight of the cabinet/counter/sink-full-of-water. That apparently can cause terrible buckling in the floor. If you should not be installing cabinets over your floors, you'd need to know the final cabinet layout before these floors go in. b) Since you are redoing your kitchen, you may end up wanting to widen doorways or open a wall or whatever. You want to lay the floor AFTER these changes are made, or you'll have weird-looking floor patches where the moved walls were. c) You want as much work done as possible before the floors go in because every workman, every tool, every job is one more opportunity for your floors to be damaged. You can protect the floors after they go in, but it's still better to have your framing, electrical, plumbing, insulation, and drywall done before the floors go in. 2) This is related to number one, but don't do ANY expensive work until you have a complete plan for what is going in your kitchen. Down to which lights and where, which size cabinets are going where, etc. What trim, etc. A kitchen remodel is like dominoes -- if one of the first tiles is not placed correctly, the rest can't fall the way you want them to. It is very costly -- in time and money -- to fix an early domino that was placed rashly, and anything you feel like you're gaining by just getting SOMETHING done now will be lost a hundredfold several weeks from now when you have to undo it after a lot of stuff has been installed over it. I really can't stress this enough: No plan? NO work. I know it's really difficult, but try not to let your urgency to restore order dictate what you actually do. You will thank yourself later. 2) As everybody else is saying, argue with your insurance for more money. 3) Start googling and pinteresting and find some inspiration pictures of kitchens you love. Get at least five, but more is better. Then sit down and figure out what are the common threads running through the pictures and how those might be put into your new kitchen. Gardenweb can help you brainstorm about this if you post your inspiration pictures. As you pull pictures, make sure you are going in a direction that fits with the architecture/style of the rest of your house. It doesn't need to be a perfect match to the rest of the house, but it should be compatible. (For example, our place is rustic Spanish-style. I like more clean, simple, and modern places. So for my kitchen, I went with more of the Spanish-revival art deco inspiration pictures -- not incongruous with our building, but also not incongruous with what I like.) 4) Concurrently with fighting your insurance company and looking for inspiration pictures you like, get gardenweb started working on a layout for your space. Post: a) a floor plan of the entire floor of your house where the kitchen is (not just a floor plan of the kitchen -- we need to consider traffic flow, so we need to see where the kitchen is in relation to other rooms in the house) b) pictures of the space (this helps with visualizing things that aren't clear on the floor plan) c) the details of who uses this kitchen and how and what features you like in a kitchen Make sure to include measurements of everything on the floor plan and preferably have the floor plan on graph paper with a 1 sq foot = 1 square scale. 5) Set up a functional kitchenette space in another room so you don't go bonkers in the meantime and you minimize the impulse to make rash, expensive decisions out of frustration. My husband had an old Ikea dresser, and Ikea sells glass tops for their dressers for $30. I put dishes in the dresser drawers, and we use the glass top as a counter top. I bought a $50 hot plate to go on our "counter," and we already had a mini fridge and a microwave. It's not perfect, but we can still eat sort of normally, and it works.

So true. And I was serious about the improvisational cakes. I've made scores. Once I only had one egg. It was denser than optimal, but it tasted good, and chalk it up to variety. I have a recipe (if you want a cake to come out exactly like it did previously, you do need to use a good recipe) for a perfect bundt cake. Perfect. But I rarely make it (not that I make many cakes nowadays because everybody is off sweets) because perfect becomes routine without variety. It's also a PITA, but that's kind of beside the point. If you have the basic ingredients in more or less the normal proportions, baking powder (unless it's an egg or yeast rising cake) and it looks and tastes like cake batter, it's cake. Cookies are harder to mess with because they melt and spread, rather than simply rising. It's easier to stick to a basic recipe, like shortbread, sugar cookie or chocolate chip dough, and just change up the flavors and additions. Or read up on the principles, like a spoon of water is the difference between crisp and chewy, and butter will give you a melt in the mouth kind of crisp, whereas margarine will give you a tougher, chewier crumb (different melting temperatures and sizes of fat globules). The big rules for cookies (which great bakers may be able to mess with, but ordinary folks shouldn't): Always use cane sugar. If you use margarine, only use baking sticks with 100 Calories per TBSP. If you wait for the cookies to be toasty brown to remove them from the oven, they'll be overbaked by the time they're cool. Watch your moisture content for the desired outcome, especially if you have smaller egg yolks. The rest is whatever you feel like making... M had the right of it, though. If you just do it and get to know the process, you'll get a feel for it and it won't be intimidating any more.