Jodik says: The coir might look dry on top, but down in the center of the pot, it could be quite moisture-laden! I have found it helpful to insert little wooden skewers carefully into the soil to about root level, and leave them there... I take them out and press them against my cheek to test for dampness... if they feel at all damp, I wait to water... but if the skewer comes out dry, it's time to water. My coir is 4" deep in a closed pot. I put the skewer to the bottom of the pot. When I take it out how many inches of bone dry top "soil" should there be before it's time to water again? Is it 1", 2" or 4"? I just went 10 days without water and only 1" of the top was dry so am I supposed to water this direct sun pot once every two weeks or so to avoid over watering, really? And how much water for my 6" closed pot? I had been watering 1 1/2 cup or so once a week and my plant was fine but I'm now worried that was too much so I'm re-evaluating. I know what conventional wisdom says (water deep, not shallow) but that advice doesn't seem to apply to my situation. Also how long should it be before I see new leaf growth in the summer time (first season outside)? My 18 month old Red Lion so far has only grown new leaves once a year. At potting and at dormancy end.

Historic residential architectural styles were not based on a "look" but a collection of specific cultural, experiential and architectural influences that were adapted and modified by architects and builders often but not always retaining much of the original intent. American Colonialists brought the Post Medieval style from England but substituted local materials (lap siding and wood roofing shingles instead of stucco, half timber and thatch). As the colonies prospered they adapted and modified the more fashionable English styles that were based on Classical (Greek & Roman) designs from the Italian Renaissance. We know these styles generally as Colonial and specifically as Georgian, Adam, etc. They were later used as inspirations for the Colonial Revival styles. In the case of the Craftsman Style, it was originally developed in southern California by the Greene Brothers. They were architects influenced by the English Arts & Crafts movement, oriental wooden structures and formal training in wood & metal working and designed intricately detailed handcrafted houses of natural materials that joined the interior with the exterior. These designs and much simpler variations were published in many American magazines like The Ladies Home Journal, Good Housekeeping and The Craftsman and were quickly adopted by pre-cut material supply companies that sold mail order kits. This resulted in the rapid spread of a watered-down version of the Craftsman Style bungalow across the country. This is why it is difficult to find a Craftsman Style house that retains much of the inspiration or detailing of the Greene brothers. A similar thing happened when a vernacular version was developed of the Prairie Style. When a historical architectural style is reduced to a "look", it usually only retains the name for advertising purposes. When I see the term Craftsman it tells me virtually nothing except that the house is unlikely to have classical detailing but you can never be sure without a photo or drawing.

Kirkhall mentioned accessibility standards for homes and there seems to be some confusion about what they are so I'll try to clarify the issues involved. There are no federal requirements for accessibility features in single-family homes. However, the federal standards (ADA) in multifamily housing have become a model for many published recommendations from states, cities, the AARP, etc. but except in a very few cases these recommendations are not laws and sometimes rely on tax credits (Atlanta) and grants (Specially Adapted Housing Grant, etc.) to persuade people to adhere to them. Unfortunately, these standards vary quite a bit regarding door openings and none that I know of address bathroom turn-around space. Bathroom turn-around space is found in the Federal ADA standards for public use buildings and in addition to the 5 ft turn-around circle there is an option for a T-shaped turn-around and both the T and the circle can include certain knee and toe spaces under other fixtures as defined in the ADA so determination of compliance requires more than a 5 ft circle drawn on the plan and for that reason you won't find that diagram in the toilet room section of the ADA. Another source of confusion is the difference between "size" and "clearance" of doorways. In the ADA the 32" required clearance is measured between the face of the door stop on the latch side and the face of the door when it is open 90 deg. That means the minimum ADA door "size" is 34" or larger depending on the hinge projection and door thickness. Many single-family recommendations call for a 32" "opening" or "size" which means the actual clearance would be 30" or less which is too small to meet the 32" ADA requirement. This clearance can be improved with offset swing-away hinges that allow the door to swing clear of the opening at 90 deg. but they are not very attractive in a home. The bottom line is that there are no national standards for single-family handicap access and using the ADA standards would be excessive and unnecessary so it is best to avoid the term "handicap accessible" and do whatever you think is reasonable to accommodate the disabled in your home. For example, if a wheelchair has wheel handrails with a maximum width of 25" to 27", a 32" door size would not be ADA compliant and would only provide 2 1/2" to 1 1/2" of space on each side for knuckles so maybe you would prefer a 34" ADA compliant door, however, for a 23" wide powered wheelchair a 30" door might be tight but a 32" door would be ideal and the chair could turn around in a 37" circle or make a T-turn almost anywhere. Of equal importance is the design of toilets, lavatories, sinks, tubs, showers, cooking equipment as well as maneuvering clearances to the sides of swinging doors all of which takes up more than 20 pages in the ADA.

What might be the moral to the story? This might be it: wait a little while if you are shocked when you read about a problem that sounds shocking to you. It probably also sounds shocking to everyone, but wait. Don't be trigger happy. Don't indulge yourself by typing out your feelings. Wait. Someone will post some kind of fact-based response within a few hours. Isn't there a Supreme Court Justice who subscribes to this theory of conservation of personal (his) initiative? He doesn't believe in "indulging himself" by vocalizing any thought processes, either. Of course, I don't recall his reserve having garnered him many plaudits for holding his curiousity or opinion in check. My initial position was paraphrased by marcolo several times. Several people have made a big ado about it. Marcolo pointed out why it is good to ask for information first. Wow. What a new idea. Ask around. Get new input. (MARCOLO! Paging Dr. Marcolo! Need Davidro-to-english translation help here, please.) Assuming I understood the point of the post, isn't that what a post on the Kitchen Forum is about? Airing personal experience, making correlations, getting opinions on similarity or dissimilarity of experience? I don't believe that posting is an automatic ticket to litigation-city. That said, while I don't disagree with David that the massive haemorrhaging of personal outrage on the KF can be a trifle wearying, the instances cited here that have apparently motivated this thread are ridiculous. For one thing: "exploding glass doors" vs "exploding glass doors that way". Yes, tempered glass explodes "that way" but to think that anyone should be expected to be blase and off-hand about the fact that their oven door blasted itself open in the course of its "normal operation" (I'll hold my opinion on self-clean in check here) is asking for the moon. It doesn't matter than tempered glass breaks a certain way - it does matter that it spontaneously imploded without a clear and discernible impact to trigger; that makes the data noteworthy and the event really should be publicized. Yes, perhaps the glass was subjected to stresses beyond normal range a while back - or even undetected anomalous events at the time of high drama: bird strike, pellets, surface scratches, edge impact - and now the smallest minor perturbation to the nominal took it beyond its elastic limit, so to speak. But if a certain product has a habit of shattering (multiple reported such outcomes) - well, the likelihood that there should be such a high correlation between purveyors of that item and 6-sigma beyond norm events that shattering glass should be an expected outcome, is statistically insignificant. More than likely then, there is indeed a manufacturing defect - either in the glass manufacture process, or planarity of the door frame into which it is inserted, its tensioning or some other assembly process. Tempered glass might shatter safely, but it doesn't have a habit of shattering so much so that anyone buying ovens or doors or whatever should expect that after the 3year/5year/7year window that they should expect to walk upto an imploded door. This is just silly. It is absolutely the right thing to do to air the fact that E'lux's oven door shattered in self-clean mode. If many E'lux ovens do that, it is likely an E'lux problem and won't be known until such complaints are aired, collected and documented. If many oven doors shatter in self-clean then either ovens will get to a point where they won't use glass in self-clean ovens or self-cleaning will be outmoded (yesssssss!). Whatever. (regardless that as far as I know, self-clean temps are well inside the tolerance regime of tempered glass). None of this happens until the user airs this. & others aren't edified until they happen upon such reports. The only factually incorrect, if that, information I ran across on the e'lux oven thread was the moral outrage about the health risks of someone walking into the glass shards. Fact is that shattered tempered glass is safer than regular shattered glass but it's no bowl of tofu, chaps. So, while I think that keeping a bit of a tamp on the emotional quotient isn't a bad idea, the motivating example has even me arguing against this thread and I certainly don't support the idea of filter's eliminating posts that exceed some imagined emotion threshold or pass someone's idea of fact-filled posts. If the last was the case, I doubt that the OP's post (top post, this thread) would have made the cut .... Hmmmm, come to think of it ....