You caught them red pawed! Haha, I saw a momma and a baby cub black bear today. I've seen bears in my back yard several times this year. I always start looking up every minute or two when I hear branches snapping.

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

riverrat1 - this is one of the few places where people could understand someone having a jam collection! That is one delicious sounding package. I'm pretty sure no one else here would appreciate the tangerine marmalade as much as I would. Or the blackberry jam. So if you would be so kind, just put them back in the box, stuff a little newspaper in there (you know, to keep them from breaking - wouldn't want them bouncing around like bb's in a boxcar, now would we?) and ship them on over here. Oh, and I tasted pickled watermelon rind for the first time this past June asn LOVED it. You can put that one in there too, just to balance out the box. Thanks.

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.