Just sitting here nodding in agreement with a lot of posts. I think the most important thing at this point is to look at your property and decide the functions you will use it for down the road so you don't ruin the space when you get around to addressing it. Yes, leave access for getting trucks and machinery to various parts of the property, even on three acres. Especially on three acres you plan to fill generously with trees. Yes on considering some groves and avoiding onesie-twosies and when the tree bug bites you, and it will, it's very enticing to want 'one of everything' and three of nothing and the visuals on that can be busy and disjointed. You have a big house, and need to consider proportions so that the trees planted near it don't come off looking dwarfed and the house monstrous. We have an epidemic here of mini-mansions festooned with dwarf weeping cherry trees, the branches pruned abruptly like a bowl haircut. We also found it more logical to start close and move out with our plantings. Although we are not close to any other dwellings, I use plantings as visual blockades to scenes I don't care to see and for privacy, so do look out your windows in the general direction of any tree you consider planting to make sure it DOESN'T block what you want to see, and does what you don't want to see. Yes I do plant trees to block sun for the shading effect. If they are deciduous, blocking sunlight isn't an issue in winter and it has a tremendous impact in summer to keep our stucco over brick house cool. It sort of amazed me to see someone mention leasing solar panels. You lease from them for your power, or they lease from you for the exposure and buy the power you generate? In our neck of the woods, it would be a company wanting to sink an oil well, instead. LOL. I have a perfect south facing roof area, but any solar panels ever getting there would be self-financed and simply supplemental in their efficiency. I don't have central air, and having a boiler heat am not interested in retrofitting ducts to accomodate it. Trees size so much more quickly than you think. I have some aerial shots of our property taken fifteen years apart and it's astounding at the amount of canopy we have now, compared to then. Our annual rainfall is adequate for most of our plantings and we have installed some freeze proof spigots away from the house, but I got a chuckle over the remark of 100 gallon tanks for watering. Tried that one year and .........well....despite how large a tractor you have, you'd better have more than a trailer behind it to pull your water tank. The center of gravity shifts in liquid loads. It ain't purty. Yes on buying small for most trees. They establish more readily and catch up with the bigger, more expensive ones quite quickly. I've had just as good success with B and B, but really the only reason I got the ones I did was I couldn't find them container. This is going to take years and it never really gets done. That's as it should be and part of the adventure. I can honestly say I've never had to rip a tree out because of poor placement. Nobody shares the exact gardening philosophy and what's right for me might not be right for you as far as pleasing to the senses. Over the years I have found I've been much more pleased with a tree whose needs have been met than one unsuitable for the growing conditions. A healthy and robust, easy care tree is often more beautiful than one which you much struggle to keep happy. Remember it's a lot easier to attend to correcting things like improper branch angles than addressing the problems they cause down the road. Have fun with it and enjoy the journey, too.

Glad to hear they got your water fixed. Thursday night I got up in the middle of the night and got a big glass of water. Drank most of it then started getting sick as a dog about 30 minutes later. Was sick all night. Then noticied the water coming out of the faucets was brown, then we had no water at all. There was a water main break but no one ever told us anything. Sure wish I'd grabbed a bottled water out of the fridge instead of filling up my glass!

When it comes to planning a house, there are some common architectural archtypes: --Massed plan: Early American houses tended to be simple, massed plans (a Monopoly "house" or "hotel"), often multi-storied, using square and retangular shapes, which were easy and economcal to build and efficient to heat in the north's winters and cool in the south's summers. Massed plans are best for small, simple structures. --Irregular plan: The advent of ballon framing in the 1800s allowed much more construction flexibility for building, and larger houses began to be common with irregular shapes (L's, T's, U's, etc) with many extensions and re-entrant shapes. Irregular plans are best for larger, more complicated structures. --Garages: Before the automobile, horses, wagons, carts and the like were kept in buildings seperate from the house, for obvious reasons. When cars first became common in the early 1900s, they were kept in the same manner as horses and wagons--seperate from the house. This approach continues to this day, but it has also become common to make the car storage a part of the main house. This latter desire has drastically impacted the overall size, shape and appearance of the house--often dwarfing or even consuming the house such that the only visible element from the street may be multiple garage doors! Small lots and large garages make the problem even worse. In this case, the house and garage are simply too large and overwhelming for the given site. In response, some of the strategies may be: --Change from a massed plan to a irregular plan to break up the mass and humanize it, bringing it back to the scale of the residential neightborhood in which it is proposed; --Find a piece of commercially zoned or mixed-use zoned property so tha the garage may be put on the first level and the living quarter placed above the garage--sort of an earlier era of "living above where one works"; --Purchase a wooded tract and place the current design in the middle surrounded by trees so that it cannot be seen, but can be enjoyed by its occupants. The current design and site are simply incompatible with each other. Discussing the plan's makeup, such as laundry room and door swings, in this case, is really pointless. A new design strategy is what is needed. Good luck with your project. --

"If you know what the exact issue your HI found is then post it here. Many of us have libraries of NEC editions going back many revisions, and other just remember when the changes occurred. Someone can tell you when the NEC changed, and if the actual 'finding' is anything to be concerned about." Brickeyee, this is what the HI put on the inspection report: ELECTRICAL: Get second opinion from electrician or check internet sites for older STAB-LOK Federal Pacific breaker panels. PANEL OR PANELS double lugging / melted insulation / missing plugs / sloppy wiring / rusted or rusting / did not open due to obstruction panel painted or sealed shut / should label all circuits /over fused or should decrees fuse or breaker size FORMCHECKBOX neutral and ground bonded in sub panel GROUNDING consider adding ground rod for additional safety and for double grounding or improving the grounding system FORMCHECKBOX ground missing at water meter or pressure reducer / loose ground wire / ground wire to small Today's standards suggest double ground to the main panel. The first ground wire should be connected to the metallic cold water pipe with a ground jumper or bond cable at the water meter The second ground wire should go to a ground rod imbedded in soil. Have electrician verify and certify all grounding conductors. Electrical not determined or evaluated in: walls, drop ceilings, closed panels, concrete, soil, behind outlet or switch plates. OUTLETS AND SWITCHES consider installing GFCI'S / open grounds / reverse polarity's / loose / painted / missing cover OTHER VISUAL CONDITIONS improper splicing / wire not in conduit or through joists / some sloppy installation dangerous or exposed wire / some lights out or not working light bulbs or damaged / some abandoned or unknown / some not energized / extension cords used / loose conduit / dangling or exposed wires / sloppy above drop ceiling Triple or double lugging exists in panels Undersized wire used for double/triple lugging" I googled "STAB-LOK Federal Pacific breaker panels" and was NOT glad to read the following: FIRES WAITING TO HAPPEN - Federal Pacific Electric Panels: Fires Waiting to Happen, Debate Waiting to Be Ended What is the FPE Stab-Lok Failure Rate and How Much Worse Is It Than Other Equipment? FPE Stab-Lok or Federal Pacific Electric Stab-lok circuit breakers can fail to trip at an alarming rate. In the original testing, at a modest overload (135% of rating) switches that had never been touched (never mechanically switched) were energized on both poles. These failed 25% of the time, followed by a lockup that meant the switch would never trip in the future at any overload. Once these switches had been flipped on and off (mechanically energized), failures increased to 36%! Worse, when individual poles on these switches were energized under the same conditions, 51% of the "virgin" switches failed, and for switches that had been mechanically energized, a whopping 65% of them failed!" A link that might be useful: inspectapedia.com/fpe/fpe.htm