Sorry, mrlike, but I'm not sure I understand what you're saying. The wording is clearly not just so they can protect themselves from others using your pictures. It says that they can use your images for monetary gain however they wish. Also, there's a clause that says that visitors can use your work, but only for personal use, not commercial. Here's the part I'm talking about, I think it's obvious that they're not just protecting themselves from the actions of others: By submitting content, which shall include your member name, to any "public area" of the GardenWeb Network, including, but not limited to, the forums and your personal website, exchange page and journal, you grant iVillage a royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive right (including any moral rights) and license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, sublicense, assign, derive revenue or other remuneration from, communicate to the public, perform and display the content (in whole or in part) worldwide and/or to incorporate it in other works in any form, media, or technology now known or later developed, for the full term of any Rights that may exist in such content. If you are not the creator of such content, you also warrant that the holder of any Rights, including moral rights in such content, has completely and effectively waived all such rights and validly and irrevocably granted to you the right to grant the license stated above. You also permit any visitor or member to access, display, view, store and reproduce such content solely for personal, noncommercial use. As an aside, that's a beautiful plant! What is it? Here is a link that might be useful: Terms of Service

Welcome to building in California. :-) I'm not an attorney, but have negotiated a lot of contracts in my day, and I built a deck (though it was DIY) so hopefully I can shed some light. 0. The drawing should include all the details Jon Mon mentioned. You want a set of drawings that has sufficient detail that if the contractor does something different than you were expecting, you can refer to them to decide whether or not he complied with the contract. You don't want to rely on verbal exchanges you had. 1. 24 months sounds like a solid warranty. 2. What John said. 3. Neglect and negligence are common legal terms. No worries about defining them. But it might be worth a conversation with the contractor about his recommendations on the things you should do to avoid being neglectful (that would be care & feeding). Negligent would be doing stupid things, like running a truck into the railings and breaking them. 4. Consequential loss or damage is indirect loss or damage resulting from damage caused by the contractor. For example, if, when digging footings he cuts an electrical line, he would need to repair the electric line but wouldn't have to replace the food in your freezer that thawed while the power was out. I think this is reasonable. 5. Check state law. 6. The best protection is to "underpay" as you go. In other words, have some money in reserve so he's got an incentive to finish. I'd keep final payment at 25% or more. You could build in a penalty for late completion, but you run the risk of him cutting corners to meet the deadline, so it's a fine line to walk. Plus weather and inspections could delay things beyond his control. 7. This means that if one of you agrees to skip a contractual provision once, the other party can't take that as a blanket permission to skip it in the future. As an example, if I've hired a GC to remodel my kitchen and the contract says he's got to leave the place clean at the end of each day, I might go on vacation for a week and say "you don't need to clean up daily while I'm gone" since I won't be living there. When I get back, he can't take the fact that I waived the cleaning requirement once as a precedent that he doesn't need to clean daily anymore. Or your contract might specify payment every Friday, but one Friday it's raining so he doesn't come to work and says it's ok to pay him Monday. You can't switch all your payments to Monday. This is standard stuff, and fine to have in a contract. 8. Definitely put in the verbiage that his work will meet or exceed IRC, CBC, and any local codes. But don't rely on that to ensure compliance. That just gives you teeth if you have to sue him later. It's much better to ensure that it IS compliant when built, and the best way to do that is to have it engineered and inspected. I don't know if CA requires a structural engineering review on a deck, but if they do, then do it. If they don't, and it's just for your peace of mind, a cheaper way to go would be to get decks.com to engineer you one. It's $99 and they provide footing placement and diameter, joist sizing, and even a materials list. Great deal, IMO, and I was very happy with their service. On permits/inspections, from someone who paid $100 for my permits for a similar size deck, I agree that $2-3K is highway robbery. But that's California. My company supplies modular elevators all over the country and the ones we ship to California cost ~20% more because of the extra engineering requirements they make us do. Some of it is justified because of the seismic risk, but a lot of it is just bureaucracy. That said, inspections make sure your contractor is doing what he should UP FRONT, and I've heard stories of people having difficulty selling their homes because the buyer finds unpermitted work, or local inspectors making people tear down unpermitted work. It sucks, but that's the price of living in California. 9. Again, it depends, but my company is in the process of hiring a SE in CA to do calcs on a 40 foot high welded steel structure and I estimate our total costs (at $110/hr) will be around $2000. So I'd shop it, if you can't use the decks.com option. Or get the decks.com drawings and have the SE just do the calcs, which should save some time and $$. Find someone who does a lot of decks so that they're used to them and are thus more efficient.

"But I still maintain that they are, I guess we will disagree about that." Well I'd have to disagree with you about that. And I'm a lawyer and much more comfortable with contract language than most people. I don't at all enjoy reading through the real estate contracts I've personally been involved with and I pity the average person without legal training who encounters one, especially for the first time. There has been a Plain English movement afoot in some legal circle for many years and part of their reform efforts have been directed to real estate contracts, but they've met with only limited success in getting the industry to adopt their clarity standards I heard a radio commentator yesterday compare mortgage brokers to used car salesman. Unfortunately, this segamnet of the industry doesn't regulate itself, so there are many brokers who are more interested in selling whatever mortgage is available to as many customers as possible. Some of them go to the extent of misrepresenting the terms of the mortgage or even committing fraud by mistating the borrowers' incomes. Combine this with a change in the way mortgages are bought and sold which started back in the 1980s. Mortgages used to be bought and sold individually, which made the buyers fussy about what they were buying and the sellers careful about the soundness of the mortgages they sold. This tended to keep borrower qualifications high and restricted the number of people who could get a mortgage. Then, the industry moved to selling mortgages in "bundles," many of high quality but it was also possible for the sellers to put some stinkers into the bundle. That meant that borrowing standards were loosened, which allowed questionable applicants to get mortages who couldn't before. So the subprime market gradually emerged. It's good, in a lot of ways, that more people can qualify for mortgages, but it also means that in a declining market like today, there are inevitably going to be a lot of foreclosures. And that's bad for everyone, not just the defaulting borrowers, but also for those who hold stock in the companies that bought these shaky mortgages, and also for the economy overall.

I'm not sure when it changed...but I believe it has been this way for some time now....definitely as of 2004, when NJDEP passed even more stringent stormwater management regs...but a neighbor was nailed for funneling his downspout water through a PVC pipe out to the street and into the storm sewerÂÂhe was required to re-route it onto his property..or face a fine...and that was in 2001. All that is really required is to use a piece of PVC pipe long enough to funnel the sump pump water and the downspout water far enough away from one's home in order to not cause foundation issues in terms of water intrusion, but still on one's own property.