I've read many times here on this forum that you cannot over water a hosta, unless it doesn't have any drainage. With your amended clay soil, your moisture retention will be better than someone with sandy soil. If you're willing to accept some crispy edges and signs of sunburn, you probably won't need to water established hostas much at all, just like the folks on this forum are saying. I rarely watered my garden before. However, I have changed my tune quite a bit...I got tired of coming home to a sunburned Sum & Substance. I do have some hostas in nearly full sun. They WILL get sunburned if I don't water them almost every day. I have a well, so don't have a water bill. I look forward to my hostas every year, and I don't like to see them distressed. This year, I plan to water a lot through the dog days of summer, then I will slow it down. I'm curious to see if my more generous watering will result in any faster growth than before, but that's not why I'm doing it. I just want them to look lush and happy. I think your hostas will train you...if you see them distressed and you don't like it, you will water more. You'll learn which areas need attention daily, and which might not even need attention weekly.

Tony and Scott - Thanks...I like the look of the Thermador. Breezygirl, If I go with the rangetop over the range, I am leaning toward the Wolf E dbl ovens plus the Wolf Steam Oven (I detest steaming on the rangetop). Would love the Gagg oven and steam oven but can't bring myself to spend that much with all the other appliances. The current SubZ and Wolf incentive takes some of the sting out it plus our builder claims I will be "delighted" with his builder discount on Wolf and SubZ. We shall see. Going to look at the Miele suite when I visit Trevor at the end of the month. Maybe I will go that way. Cheers, M

Val, Bed Bath & Beyond sells duvet clips (you may have to ask someone to find them for you in the store, I did). They are padded so you won't feel them too much on the outside, inside they clip the edge of the duvet to the comforter. I had to buy a couple sets for my cal king bedding, just doing the corners wasn't enough. DH would tug on it and the clip would fall out. They're a hassle to put on and you'll find you don't want to wash the duvet as often just to avoid the whole clipping and unclipping process. But at least it keeps the comforter from traveling inside the duvet. I'm so sick of dealing with this problem this will be my last duvet. If I have to pile on layer after layer of coverlets I'll do it just to be rid of this annoyance. Maybe I dislike duvets more than most people because a Cal King comforter is so large it's difficult to shake it out when the comforter falls to the foot of the bed. I hate pulling up the duvet on a cold night only to realize there is no comforter inside, it's moved halfway down the bed!

Not one bit. I've got a relatively small kitchen too with only five base cabinets: a sink cabinet, a 12" cabinet, and two 30" drawer cabinets. The 30" drawers are EXTREMELY useful, versatile, hold basically all my kitchen dishes and tools that I use often, and make it very easy to see all my stuff at a glance and to store pots/pans in a way that doesnt' require me to stack/unstack them often. If I hadn't deaded (killed?) one corner, I'd have lost the second 30" drawer cabinet in favor of an 18" drawer cabinet (which wouldn't have been nearly as flexible to use as the big drawers I have now) and a corner cabinet that would have had to be custom made ($$$) because of some challenges in that dead corner and outfitted with one of those kidney bean pull-outs ($$$) in order to be functional -- yet still not as functional as drawers. My mother thought I was crazy to void a corner in small kitchen, but it really isn't about pure square footage when it comes to kitchen storage. It has to be easy to use, low-headache storage space for it to be valuable.