... blueprints are like pets and children -- difficult to appreciate or understand unless they're yours.

But a hobby, like a habit, makes you forget about important things in life.

Call me an alarmist, but there are certain words I don't like to hear together: cheap fireplace, discount brakes, cut-rate surgery.

I once complained to my father that I didn't seem to be able to do things the same way other people did. Dad's advice? 'Margo, don't be a sheep.People hate sheep. They eat sheep.'

At the beginning of a remodel, money is everything, but as you go along, it becomes secondary to the vision. You can't have the house looking like a glorious jewel and leave the cracked linoleum or the icky light fixture, so you spend and spend and spend. Then one day it suddenly occurs to you that all that play money you've been throwing around is real - and it's in someone else's bank account.

Show dogs and their handlers remind me of Brooke Shields and her mother: an incredibly disheveled person tethered to an impeccably groomed animal.

My husband says that I'm afraid of heights, but that's not true. What I'm afraid of is falling.