While you're at it, please take some pictures of other parts of your garden too please. The first picture gives glimpses of a beautiful garden and I'm sure we all want to see more. Your Cl. Pinkie, by the way, seems to have more petals than mine, almost to the point where I wonder whether it's the same rose. Mine is only about two years old and not a very steady bloomer yet, so that may be part of the reason. Ingrid

Not to dissuade you from relying on the 3-D program for the info. you need, but I've never found that they give me a real sense of what a space will be like. It's not like walking through rooms on TV; it's a distorted view. A lot of people do better mocking up rooms in actual size using cardboard, sheets hung on clotheslines, studs and cardboard and string out the the backyard, etc. We got enough of a sense of size when we were designing by measuring already built spaces. Our own; those in tours of homes, open houses, and new homes for sale; and in friends and family's homes, who were flattered that we liked something enough to ask to measure it. (We always cast it that way, rather than "can we measure your dinky bath so we won't make ours that small?"!) I understand the discomfort you have both in speaking up and in acquiescing when you don't like a design feature. Just remember that this is not like surgery, where you'd be wise not to insist on your surgical methods. It is, however, somewhat akin to cosmetic surgery, where you would be well advised to have a LOT to say about how you want the outcome to be. And less to say about his surgical techniques. Think about what the outcome of you insisting on a change that would have been OK as the architect had it. In your bath, assuming adding space would not compromise the adjacent area it was borrowed from, I can't see that you would have made a mistake by enlarging the bath. However, you could be making a mistake, for you, by leaving it its current size. So, in this case, you can't be wrong to enlarge it. My remarks to him would be: "I've measured some similar baths and they're fine, but we've decided that we'd be happier with it if we widened it 18 inches." Or something like that. It's not too late to do that. In fact, he'll probably be more likely to listen to you in the future when you voice a concern if he has to now go back and fiddle with that bath again. 'We' is an excellent way to phrase things. It reflects the collaborative nature of designing your home. And it softens the communication. And, it serves as a gentle reminder that this house is about the wants, needs, and even whims of a particular "we" that will be living in it, and paying a small fortune to their architect. I understand your discomfort. I've finally spent time, eyes closed, walking through our design over and over. I can't visualize it, but the vision is getting clearer. Still, I know there will be total surprises. We're not doing anything so odd that any of them will be a disaster. Don't worry so much about how you might feel later. Laying blame, on yourself or someone else, is rarely productive. You will make errors of judgment and so will he. And life will go on. Nothing will be disastrous--unless the house falls down. And, you know, a lot of people live with a bathroom that looks less spacious than they'd hoped for. Even worse, like us, they live with a bath that's functionally barely big enough. In our case, it's a powder room and we intentionally sacrificed size there to gain it in the foyer. Our own judgment. We measured 3 different real-life baths before we insisted with our architect on the size we wanted. I also pulled the NKBA's guidelines on minimum sizes and handed them to her, so she'd see that we exceeded those and so weren't out in left field in our judgment. There's subjectivity involved even in an architect's judgment Good luck and I do hope you'll speak up--tactfully, pleasantly, with information and thought behind you. And take some magazine pages/photos/online images of some of the windows and woodworking you like. A picture is truly worth a thousand words. "I finally found the woodwork I really like. Here it is; let's incorporate that into the design." (Don't mention that you gave it to him earlier.) You can do this, but might need to do more homework first to feel confident in what you want.

Kitchens DO need an oil based sealing primer because even if you do all the right steps and clean the cabinets with TSP, scuff sand, and then prime with just a regular water based stain blocking primer, microscopic kitchen grease that is still left can bleed through. Especially in older kitchens that don't have proper ventilation. Grease gets into the pores of the wood where the finish has failed. Just like the pitch in knotty pine, water based primers just don't cut it here. Bleedthrough may not happen right away, but it WILL happen, and it will ruin your paint job. Painting is all about prep work, and there are no shortcuts to doing that right, despite what all the marketers would have you believe. And, I'd never recommend doing chalk paint anywhere in a kitchen, even if you are going to seal it with acrylic. That's still two coats of painting, and you might as well make that a coat of primer and a topcoat. The only thing you're skipping is the scuff sanding, and that's not at all onerous to do. You'll just end up with a better quality job if you use the right products for the right job and don't skimp on the labor portion either. If you want to minimize the labor, a HVLP sprayer as was suggested above will help you with that, but it does have a learning curve and requires a significant investment in equipment. However, I'm of the opinion that every single home needs to own a decent air compressor, because there are SO many things that you can do with it. Filling the kids float toys, blowing leaves off of the driveway, using a brad nailer to apply crown molding, using an air wrench to remove the lugs to change a tire, and the list could go on and on....

opaone: Looks like my sensor collection is missing a component, even though my house is deliberately "leaky." Is this the IQAir [AirVisual Pro] Smart Indoor & Outdoor Air Quality Monitor [PM2.5, CO2, AQI, Temperature, Humidity]? How do you like it, and why did you select this brand? I have several. Of the consumer variety this and Foobot are generally the more accurate according to testing by Lawrence Livermore and others. I went through five IQAir's (testing against a borrowed lab meter) before settling on this one. All were fairly accurate but this one was the closest. Foobot was similar though I only went through three. I keep an IQAir and Foobot next to each other in our bedroom all the time and then have another IQAir that I move around wherever needed. I write about healthcare and population health and IAQ is an increasingly critical component.