I've managed to extricate all the brass from my kitchen. I'm so pleased. I hate brass, and every piece of hardware in the whole house was brass when we bought it. Now I only have to work on the oak. I hate oak as well. It was really tough to find hardware for the cupboards because what was there was an odd size and for a long time I could only find special-order pieces at around $12 a unit (and I had 20 to replace) but I was in Ikea the other day and found them - 5", black, perfect. The other option, of course, was to fill the top hole and re-drill, but that's risky too. I'm planning on having the cupboards painted (I don't have any confidence in myself to do it nicely) but this will not be for a while. Just looking at the brass-less kitchen makes me smile. Ah, small pleasures. Layton got the lattice up on our fence (when we bought the house, one fence was covered in chicken wire and vines, but we cut the vines down to replace the chicken wire with lattice) so I hope the vines grow in quickly. He also assembled my bistro set (we didn't get to do this last year because I couldn't find the hardware) so all I need is to figure out where to put it. It's so nice that the house is coming together. I finally found a window shade for the kitchen (the one that was there when we moved in is not actually oak, but it's the color of oak) but I haven't been able to locate one in the proper size so that has to wait. Still, it's nice to know progress is being made. Wow, thank god for tax returns.