Choosing a new lawn mower

When we bought our old house 16 years ago, we bought an inexpensive Craftsman push mower to care for the smallish lawn.  It held up well (a little less so after our kids started using it), but has been showing its age lately.  I patched the rusted-through deck with duct tape (which worked quite well), and I've had to rebuild the carburetor every couple years when it didn't want to start.  Last week, even cleaning the carb wasn't enough to keep it running, so I decided it was finally time to upgrade.  I did lots of research and ended up coming home with another Craftsman that was very similar in concept to our old mower.  Given the amount of time I spent on this decision, I figured I should share my thought process with you all.

We've got our house drawings!

After interviewing three potential custom home builders, one of the next steps was for us to get our desired plans put to paper so that the builders could each give us an accurate cost estimate and we could do an apples-to-apples comparison.  Cost isn't the only criteria we're using to choose a builder, of course, but it is a big part of it.  According to all three builders, there are basically two draftsmen in town that do the majority of the custom plans: New Ventures and Residential Drafting Services (RDS).  We went with the latter.