I just stumbled upon this post as I try to prevent the recurring problems from Barn Swallows again this year. Unfortunately, the image is no longer available and I cannot see how you hung the netting. We have a colony of Barn Swallows that roost at our apartment building each year. The landlord hates them, but a former tenant had posted signs everywhere about how it was illegal to remove the nests. It was only through my own research that I realized it was only illegal while eggs or babies were in the nests, and those tenants moved out this winter. In addition to nesting on top of our buildings lights, covered walkways, and eaves, my apartment and the one next door have outdoor entrances from our gorgeous courtyard and patio which have covered stairwells. Each year, the swallows fly through these two stairwells like its the Lincoln Tunnel, dive bombing anyone who tries to walk on the stairs. They build their nests on the outlet boxes or porch lights. The first summer we lived here, I thought it was really neat to have such a close view of their lives, as I would often sit on my steps and could watch the babies as they grew, taking great care to be quiet and non-threatening. However, I also found that my porch steps and exterior wall were covered with bird droppings. They are also very very noisy when there is an entire colony of them outside of your windows. All of the "teenage" birds hang out in one of our courtyard trees outside of my window, which my cat loves but can actually drown out any conversation or television in our living room. Then I experienced what I thought were bed bugs in our house. I had tiny bites head to toe and could constantly feel them crawling on me despite rarely being able to see anything. It got so bad that I was getting the bites infected from itching all the time, and I couldn't sleep because I could feel the bugs crawling on my skin as soon as I tried to relax. I finally captured a few and took them to the University's Department of Entymology, who identified them as bird mites. That experience was HORRIFIC. I was ready to burn our entire building down after reading that the bird mites multiply much more quickly than bed bugs and are nearly impossible to remove. Luckily, the mites died off when the birds finally left for the season, but I can no longer sit outside on my wooden stairs because I fear contracting them again. The next spring, I tried the knock-down method, just on my own stairwell. I would open my screen door 2 inches and use a broom handle to knock down the nests up to 7 times a day. The swallows became very agitated, and and two attacked my daughter's head when she got home from school one of the days. I couldn't sit inside and repeat this process forever, though, and they got their nest up one day while I was off at a 12 hour work shift. The outlet covers they use are too high up to see into, and I knew that some other nests already had eggs, so I couldn't knock it down, more out of compassion than fear of charges. This will be our third summer here. Our elderly landlord has given up trying to prevent them from nesting even in the building entryways. I have removed my porch light cover so there is no solid surface to nest on, but the outlet box cover is too high up and I can't put a ladder on the stairs to reach it. I have considered trying to throw a cotton ball soaked with peppermint oil up there (it has worked in the past for mice and spider problems), or hanging a bunch of cut aluminum as a mobile at the top of the steps (I have heard that the reflections off the metal scare birds off), but I simply can't go through another year of this if those methods don't work. I saw that I could use something to create a 45% slope where the nest to prevent them, but again... getting up there is an issue. I am curious to see how you used the mesh. Could you please share the picture again?

We went through similar confusion. You probably got a "plat of survey" when you bought your lot. An architect should find that sufficient to get you started (although they might want to see a topographical survey as well if your lot is hilly or has other challenges). Check your town's requirements - ours requires that the "plat of survey" submitted with the permit application be less than a year old. If you are going with a design/build package, the GC should guide you from there. If you haven't got a GC yet, while the architect is working on the plans and assembling a bid package, consider getting a "topographical survey" done. While you are waiting for the topo (about 1-2 weeks), you'll want to select a civil engineer. C.E. will need to see both surveys as well as some preliminary plans (architect's site plan especially) in order to prepare your civil engineering plan. The architectural plans and the civil engineering plans need to coordinate with each other (i.e. architect shouldn't have 1.5" water service when civil engineer's plans call for 1" service). Its to your financial benefit to make sure this coordination happens before you get your submittal set of plans (the ones you and/or your "future GC" will be submitting for permit) from the architect. You can start talking to general contractors/builders at any time to narrow your finalists down by quality of work, personality, references, etc. However, builders not involved from the very beginning will want to see the architect's bid package before giving pricing details. I hope this helps!

What kind of climate does the new house have? What kind of insulation? Even if they're not expensive, do you lay down wines for years ahead, or buy your wines aged and drink them within a year or so? Even a normally cool place can get hot enough to disturb wine during a heat wave (voice of experience). That being the case, and since A/C can fail, blackouts happen, etc., it's best to keep wines away from exterior walls, and low. A little extra insulation, and some cool retainers like concrete or tile, can make a fairly inexpensive wine cupboard. But if you have more wine than will fit in a a small cupboard, you probably have more wine than you can drink in a season. In that case, yes, it's worth putting in a stoarage apparatus, whether it's tricked out wine closet/room, a freestanding cellar, or just a wine fridge. How much money do you have invested in your inexpensive wines? I would guess that the total would be a good guide for how much to spend on storing it. (Of course, if you had a proper cellar you might be motivated to increase your oenophilia).

Ideally, if you want a reliable home network that covers the entire house in a metropolitan area, you want one low-powered access point per one or two rooms. Where we live, the noise floor is really high. I can see at least 200 other WiFi networks; and that's not even counting microwaves and other equipment that operates in this frequency range. Cranking up the power of the access point doesn't really help much, as the mobile device simply won't have enough power to reply back. In the end, you just end up contributing to the global problem without making things better for own local network. Instead, having small point-of-use access points improves the situation dramatically. This is what successful commercial installations in office buildings, event centers, or hotels do as well. The WiFi standard supports seamless roaming between multiple access points, and has done so pretty much from day one. But many consumer access point have buggy implementations. If you buy an access point that is meant for multi-point deployment, things will work much more reliably. So, mesh access points are great, WiFi repeaters are potentially questionable. Also, roaming is initiated by the client not by the access point. So, it works much better, if the power of each individual access point is dialed down. If your mesh access points support a separate backhaul, that's a great option. An even better option is hardwiring with dedicated ethernet wiring to a central location. Powerline networks are somewhere in-between all of this. If it works, it is slower than ethernet but possibly fast enough for WiFi. But if it doesn't work, then there really isn't any good way to debug it. There are lots of things that can interfere with it. Also, it causes crazy bad interference for HAM radios.