P G wrote, "...my question to you, how would you handle it, if someone expresses their needs/wish list for a home and then shows u a plan, which they are not married or necessarily attached to?..." It's a good question, and a common one. Probably every practicing architect has faced this more than once. The challenge is the degree to which (or not) they "are or aren't married to" the stock plan or home-grown plan. The all too frequent reality is that after spending inordinate amounts of time looking on the Internet for the "perfect" plan, and especially spending eons of time doing one's on plan using a CAD system, most human beings ARE married to their plan in whole or in part. You can test this by asking your husband if he's willing to abandon his plan! Thus, an experienced and creative architect is going to have to spend additional time to review the stock plan with the consumer and gently suggest, "well, have you thought about this...?", and "have you considered that...?", attempting to demonstrate that there may be better and more appropriate directions and solutions. It's really so much easier and more fun to start with a clean sheet of paper, working closely together with the architect of your choosing. You will be able to tell a lot about your architectural technologist by how they respond to this plan and your husband's plan. If s/he simply say, "Sure, I can get this drafted up in just a few days...", you have a big problem. On the other hand, if they scratch their chin, and say, "Well, have you thought about this...?", you may have a keeper! I really don't know what a Canadian Architecture Technologist can do. There is no equivalent in the U.S. Their degree and training is less than an architect's, and they may be legally limited in the size and type of buildings they can design. My guess is that they fit somewhere between a draftsperson and an architect. I would think their technical knowledge and skill may be strong, but wonder if they have the true creative abilities of talented architects. If their past work looks appealing and they have good references, it's worth a go.

I may try costco, but I am done with the online retailers. Would advise anyone to avoid Nectar. Their website states the shipping date, yet they fail to ship or notify you of a delay and on other sites they say their shipping issues are resolved. Not from my experience. When you try email you get a response that they are very busy and will get back to you at a later time, I was told approximately 3 days yet it has been a week and no response. When you ask for a refund you get directed to a line with a voice mail. Have not had a return call after days of leaving messages. If you call customer service you can immediately get thru for new sales, however when you say you are checking on a order or want a cancellation you are disconnected. Looks like I will end up going thru my credit card to get a refund. Bummer..

I've ordered from exotic-plants.de a few times now. I've found the quality to be very good even on the time sensitive seeds like pachypodium which are some of my favorites. I also find they usually give you more seeds than what you purchased which is always a nice surprise. I've ordered some seeds from baobabs.com and they seemed fine but I've mainly ordered plants and cuttings from them. The last one I've ordered seeds from is Arvice seeds which were on Amazon at the time. The seeds were all probably good but I drug my feet for a long time before I used them so I didn't get great results but still had lots of seedlings.

Hi. I don't own an Ilve range (still at the "just looking" stage) but the difficulties you describe with lighting the burners sounds like it might be the result of a safety feature of this range. (This would also explain why the technician replacing parts didn't help; "works as designed".) From the (terrible!!!) manual: LIGHTING THE GAS BURNERS First you have to choose the burner, through indication near the knob, then press the knob (A) controlling the desidered (sic) burner and turn it towards the left. It is important to press the knob for 10 seconds. In this way the thermocouple bulb overheats and the gas passage is enabled. This feature is designed to prevent an unlit burner from leaking natural gas into the room and the consequences that can result from that. It is a fairly common safety feature in European-market ranges. We lived in the UK for a year and I'll admit that my devil-may-care American attitude found this feature of our "hob" super-annoying. But after watching the house next door to mine burn down (not from a range failure, as far as I know) I am finding it more difficult to dismiss safety features like this out of hand. Kind regards, Rob