THIS IS FROM KARLS WEBSITE ON BLACKSPOT: Q: Blackspots-2 My roses have a terrible case of black spot. I have taken Jerry Bakers advice and painted every leaf with a tomato leaf, onion and rubbing alcohol brew. This has seemed to help some. But, I still have black spots. I have already cut two bushes back due to all of the leaves falling off. Last summer my roses were beautiful I sprayed them regularly and never had this problem. Now this summer with a new baby they have been a little neglected. Thank you A: You should have written to Jerry Baker as it seems his advice isn't working. I don't follow or even know what his advice is. The only way to control black spot is to prevent it, not wait for it to appear. If his advice were that good every American Rose Society member would be following it. We don't like black spot either. I recently suffered a massive stroke and cannot get out to my rose beds like I should. They are suffering because of it. Many of my roses are leafless sticks. I remove any blooms from them but do not cut them back as they will leaf back out. Preventative spraying is the only way to control black spot. That means spraying with a fungicide labeled for roses when the bushes leaf out in the spring and continuing as directed on the label all through the summer and into the fall until the first hard frost. To kill any BS now, spray 3 times, 3 days apart with Manzoceb or Manzate. This should clean up your foliage. Then spray with Banner Maxx mixed with Manzoceb every two weeks as a preventative. If you only have a few roses you may not want to spend all that money on Banner Maxx. You can get the same active ingredient in Fertilome's Liquid Systemic Fungicide. Banner Maxx requires 1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon per gallon while the Fertilome product requires 2 tablespoons per gallon. Banner Maxx is about $70 a pint and the Fertilome product is $21 a pint. A pint of BM would last many years if you have just a few roses. Funginex, Daconil, and Immunox available from many garden centers, Home Depot and Wal*Mart will work also. Make sure you follow the directions carefully and read the label. Good luck with your new baby! Right now that is the most important thing in your life. Roses can be replaced quite easily. A source for Manzoceb, Manzate, and Banner Maxx is www.muncyrose.com or www.rosemania.com Spraying will take less time than painting the leaves. ------------------------------------------------------------ The link to this article is: http://www.rosenut.com/askrosenut/Q&A1.htm#Blackspots-2

Fiberglass at the rims is a particularly poor choice in the South, where the pressure drive (warm to cold) is predominantly from the exterior to the interior. Judging best practice by looking at what other builders are doing is not the best way to improve the details on your own home. Liquid water from leaking exterior sheathing will leak around and through foam boards and sprayed foam. But unlike fiberglass insulation, the foam board and spray foam are not moisture sensitive and will not lose R value or provide a home for mould growth. Here is a link that might be useful: Understanding Basements--BSD-103

I think I originated the confusion here about this being multi family. You described the building on a post somewhere as being a 3 floor commercial structure, and for some reason, that sounded as though it were going to be a 3 residence apartment when you were done. I apologize for the incorrect assumption. You might try State Farm or Farmers Insurance to get additional quotes from as they've been friendly to "non standard" residences of acquaintances of mine, although most have had their issues with either codes enforcement or their insurance companies. My friend who owns an 1820 building in downtown Memphis had the codes people write him up for several things when they did an "urban blight" sweep a few years ago. He had to immediately put in a sprinkler system and repoint the entire exterior to be in compliance. He also had to spend about 14K in replumbing the structure because of old cast iron piping and to work to be split into 4 apartments. That's the "master plan" anyway. Right now he only occupies 1/4 of the building. It has 12' tall windows that you can get a glimpse of the river though, and it's worth some sweat and tears! I did a kitchen in a residence converted from a 1910 cotton gin that the homeowners had a LOT of issues with red tape on the conversion. They used Farmers, but they also had to take out a bond of X amount to serve as the General Contractor on the project. Their mortgage holder required that as they didn't want to end up holding the bag on a half finished project. And that was during the boom construction years. Last year, my sister couldn't even get a loan to buy a small church to convert to a residence. No bank would talk to her about the project unless she had architectural plans and enough funding in place to hire a GC to do the project. If she had all of that, she wouldn't have needed a bank loan! I hope you find new insurance ASAP and I'd love to see more pics of your building. It sounds unique!

chisue, understand the lesser of two evils. They use prednisone for my disease too. Thankfully, I've never been bad enough to have to use it on a daily basis. I'm allergic to one of the main drugs to treat my disease so if my current drugs really stops working I will have no choice but to take those awful , dangerous and expensive drugs. Hopefully it will never come to that. I have one older brother that did not move to the States when my family moved and so I've really been thinking about how much easier it was for him to retire in Canada. No jumping through all these hoops to figure out how to get his health care needs covered. Emma, what I understand is that they don't have to insure you if you have had a gap in insurance and are outside the 6 month open enrollment. Our situation was a little confusing to these insurers because our medicare part A automatically kicked in at 65 and our B took effect two years later when my husband turned 67. So they carelessly were just looking at the date part A kicked in and assumed we'd had a two year gap in coverage. Some asked if we'd been on cobra. They were asking for proof of insurance until I reminded them that medicare B was just starting and we were within the 6 month open enrollment. The drug plan still said that if I had not been covered they would have raised my premium.Not sure if that is legal under the 6 month open enrollment, but I didn't research it anymore sine it didn't apply to me. In my case, if I went without and then ended up going on one of those $3000 a month drugs and then decided at that time to get part D, no one would be too excited to insure me . And you can bet if one of my drugs was $3000 a month and they agreed to insure me, my premium would be pretty hefty. Our total costs for the two of us are around $480 a month United(AARP) is $116.78 for me, $121.94 for my husband. It is community based which means they can't raise your premium just because you are a year older. It goes up according to your zip code. In my state there were only two options for community based or issue age --the two that can't be raised because you are a year older. All the others were attained age which will go up for each year older you get. Then medicare B is $99.90 for each of us. I'm paying $27 for my part D and my husband picked the cheapest for 15 a month. I didn't figure it was as important to get the perfect plan with drug because it apparently is easy to change at the end of the year if what you picked didn't work out so well. It just seemed to me that there was a real learning curve to getting this all arranged. Dedtired, I'm confused why you would be paying 300 a month for medicare part B or something else?? something doesn't sound right.