Many of the things mentioned, are from previous safety failures in farm management. He considers his farm clean to process meat. Uninspected, unobserved, the animal and meat handling could be anything! I have seen home butchering done in the barn aisle, carcass dropped onto an old bloody sheet or canvas to cut up for packages. No washing of the butcher person, he is wearing his overalls, old muddy barn boots as he wrestles the half and other portions onto some boards across sawhorses to cut up. Open air, lots of flies on the meat, because it is a warm spring or fall day. Flies come on over from the paddocks of contained animals amd manure in them. Yep, I REALLY want to get my meat from him! Actually, I no longer accepted dinner invites from those folks after helping with some job or just visiting!! You would never know about that "handling method" as you buy those little meat packages. Whining writer could do as others do, sell the portions of animal. Then he will have animal processed at the butcher location, customers pick up the finished product from the Gov't. inspected, licensed facility. It is not going to cost him any more at all. Gov't. Inspected can mean a lot of things, they are not all equal. However the place and methods get looked at now and again, better than nothing. Hiring regulations are to protect the worker. If a farmer or his family members use tools that are elderly, questionable with no safety guards or bad wiring, that is a family choice. Hired help should not be forced to work under those conditions. Power tools, by their design, are not something you let small kids or younger kids use. They come with manuals of safety, handling instructions that no one reads, to protect the user. Do the farm employers take time to do safety training of these employees, to use the various tools? Not often, if at all. Everyone already "knows" how to do farm stuff!! Kids seldom will argue with an elder person if told to do a job. Kids do not have the experience to spot dangers or understand the problems that might occur in doing a job the wrong way. They don't often think, period! Kids want to earn money, are not going to worry about the dangers they place themselves in, while doing that job. Plus kids forget what you said, ignore the directions they were given before, THINK for themselves. Original thought by kids might add to the dangers!! Their "kid brains" just work that way! Part of growing up is brain development, which can't happen before brain is ready to grow that way. Actual body development may hinder kids in trying to do things, they have different visual fields, motor skills. They often can't help how they think and react, just an age thing. Each grows up at their own speed, should not be grouped by age in all cases. Big size or older age, is NOT mature in body or thinking!! Adult farm workers may not read well, or have used this kind of tool or machine before. They SHOULD be shown how to use it, have the guards and safeties in place to protect them. I can't believe how often the safety features are over-ridden or removed to make it easier to get hurt. Yet it happens ALL THE TIME. I guess you have to protect people from themselves because they will hurt and kill themselves if not supervised. I will agree there are many conflicting and peculiarly written laws in farming. Still were always written for a good, original reason. Farming is about the most dangerous occupation in the US. I think deep-sea fishing is number one. So many places and ways to get hurt in any farming operation. Even if just reading the laws makes you think about your lack of meeting the rules, you might CHANGE a couple things to be better/safer, for yourself. As we live in the setting, we lose our discerning eye for danger. No longer see the repaired cords, long extensions run to get power in a location, double plugs on an outlet, jury-rigging to keep a tractor running, instead of REALLY fixing it right. Just keep rounding up the loose animals, not fixing fence. Climbing the ladder with missing or cracked treads. Not turning off the tractor to unhitch the wagon by ourself, on the hill, with brakes we never repaired. Taking constant chances, which so far have not broken the odds of survival. Yet stuff like this IS a source of danger, we have become used to it or ignore the dangers. The Gov't. gets involved because this thinking is so prevailing, bad stuff never is fixed, endagers the hired help. Not acceptable as safety in Industry, or on the "old farm" either. People die with ignoring safety. The original writing is totally a rant, no one gets to do everything his own way, anyplace. Many nations are much more strict than the US. The food chain is very vulnerable anyplace in the length. It does need checking, to keep things somewhat safer than you would ever see with self-governing along the way.

I love side porches! In many of the older neighborhoods with beautiful traditional homes in our area, a side porch must have been a requirement. It's unusual for them not to have one. The side porches are usually recessed a few feet from the front of the house and extend out for 15' or so. Originally the porches were screened to "catch the breeze." Now, with air conditioning, many of them are glassed in. Whether glassed or screened, the porches afford wonderful landscape views on three sides. We'll have a 10' wide screen porch on the side of our new home---just wide enough to accomodate the 5' porch swing my uncle made for me 25 years ago. If you have a screen porch, you must add a porch swing! lkplatow, I love your porch. It's a great size.

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.

Also in Ontario here. I'm not a roofer, nor a roof expert, but my husband has done some repairs here and there on our roof, and we've both inspected it over the years. Your picture above is a bit dark to see. But are you are saying that the part of the roof which is darker is the part just underneath the eavestrough on the upper roof on the 2nd floor ? If so, one thing to do is to make sure you keep the gutter clean and unclogged above that spot - because if there is constant water overflowing from the 2nd floor onto the garage roof right at that particular spot, you will find a lot of deterioration on the shingles where the majority of the water hits. We have small sections of our roof which deteriorates much faster than other areas specifically because water pours from the high roof to the lower roof. Watch during a heavy rainstorm to see if the water is properly going down the downspout from the 2nd floor roof to the roof over the garage, or if it is pouring over the edge. If pouring over the edge, you'll see faster deterioration in your roof shingles. I make a point to go out during rainstorms if I can to watch for clogging. If you've ever cleaned gutters, you'll find in addition to leaves and such, you'll find little shingle particles. So as the shingles deteriorate, little bits of them come off and collect in the gutters. You might see lots of little bits of shingle directly in the gutter above the garage door and just below the darker area. This can help to affect the colour of the shingles. There may be a different reason for your darker shingles, but I suggest this only because it looks like the darker area is directly below the upper roof. Sometimes you can look around the neighbourhood and see other people where the roof is failing in specific areas just because that part of the roof is being bombarded with too much water.