My problem with the garden is every flower seems white. Need some color. The foliage looks nice. Flowers though to me are secondary to texture and foliage color, which in this garden is pretty good! I myself would not move the grass or sedge whatever it is. It makes the texture change. My garden is wild with overgrowth. It seems with perennials I'm always thinning them. Another suggestion is flower type, I don't see anything with spikes. You want different flower forms. Maybe a daisy form flower too. Irises etc. If you like the white look fine, but I myself would add silvers or silver foliage, or pastels would look great! Another consideration is early, mid, and late flowering plants. So it looks good all season. I myself am still experimenting, I doubt I will ever actually ever finish but keep changes things. Plus the fun of growing new plants. I have a flair for the unusual. My porch is full of tropical's, trees and plants like Pony Tail palm, Yucca tree, night blooming jasmine, etc. I have bamboo and cacti in the ground too. Some forms are winter hardy. It doesn't look typical! It looks eccentric, but I'm very much so! Mostly though I grow edibles and I'm into edible landscapes. I want to grow as many ornamental edibles as possible besides your normal garden. So edible dogwoods, June berries like Autumn Brilliance. Red leafed peach trees Weeping plum trees. A currant cordon on the fence, I like edible vines like Eastern Magnolia. Edible wild flowers are in the garden too. Strawberry and raspberry ground covers are next to be put in. Yes some raspberries are ground covers. I also grow regular raspberries too, I have 15 plants. I get 25-50 berries daily for 4 months. I have Pluots, and a Spice Zee Nectaplum. Indian Free peach that Thomas Jefferson grew. It is pretty much a jungle here! Many plants are small give me a few years, and I will show photos. It's still under construction. This post was edited by Drew51 on Thu, Oct 10, 13 at 10:09

Hi again. The leaking toilet is from the late 50's by Richmond. The two closet bolts that are missing are located at the rear of the toilet. Are there replacement bolts for a toilet this old? The other two bolts look original. I cannot understand why that plumber I hired six months ago didn't replace the missing bolts and didn't fix the movement in the toilet. Shouldn't he have addressed these issues when he was here, since I told him about them? When a plumber comes to fix the currently leaking wax seal, what if he finds that the wood structure underneath is wet or rotted? There could have been a small leak that I didn't know about. Is it the plumber's job to replace rotted wood, or does that require hiring a builder/carpenter? If the wood is only damp, then can the plumber go ahead and replace the wax seal and set the toilet that same day without waiting for the wood to dry? If there is damage/rot to the wood, how long does a repair like this usually take to fix? I only have one toilet in this house. Thank you for any help.

I would say best practice for hiring for a position like yours is to include in the posting that there is a preference for internal candidates. I know when I was a job seeker I found that a fair way to give me a heads up about the likelihood of getting the job. That is a great response and thank you for offering a reasonable and thoughtful response, however, that could be an ethical violation. This is a perfect demonstration of the difference between ethical and honest. You have a fiduciary duty to the company you work for. If revealing a preference for internal candidates will yield a less qualified pool (which it definitely will), and there is even a chance you would hire an external candidate (which might apply), then your honesty would be an ethical violation. You were not hired by your organization to look out for the interest of applicants, you were hired to look out for the best interest of the organization that pays you. You were free to turn down the job, but you didn't. ----- So let's turn this back around to a contractor. Suppose a contractor has a couple of partners in his business, and he is asked to do a bid for someone, which is a service he charges for. As the bid comes together he realizes that he has no intention of accepting the job. What should he do? Obviously, the move with the most integrity is to give the money back and come clean, anything else is tantamount to stealing. However, returning money that he had no obligation to, would be a violation of his fiduciary duty to his partners. Ethics aside, I don't think you are well equipped to GC your own home build based on this information. I completely agree with this. This is also why I think finding out how much you will have to pay someone to do it for you is a really great option.

Looks like they put the sewer line too close to the wall so that the toilet wouldn’t fit with a normal one. There isn’t any concrete under the front of the flange so when they put the toilet on and someone sat on it that’s what cracked it. Not sure if the previous owner had any issues with it before. We bought the house with a green/blue water stain on the floor on the side of the toilet where the crack is. Really wishing we had the inspection look into that.