Jim Katen

It means that the regulatory body keeps account of you: can keep track of you, fine you, or take away your license. Whether it does so with wisdom is an entirely different discussion. The point of licensing is to keep track of the licensee, not to ensure the licensee's competence. It's exactly the same with a driver's license.

Licensing (of drivers, home inspectors, hairdressers, etc) doesn't ensure competence, it provides a means of accountability.

And now that I think about it, it's probably older. The plate has a check box for manufactured gas. In my area, manufactured gas was gone by the mid 50s.

I'd say it's from 1963 or earlier based on the abbreviation of Illinois. Pre-63 was Ill, Post-63 was IL. Don't try to decode the serial number. They tended to just be sequential in those days, without any specific encoding of dates.

My opinion is that an attorney's advice is utterly worthless unless it's the attorney who'll be representing you in the event of a suit. If that's the case, then use the agreement that he's written because he's written it to go along with his defense plan. If this attorney won't be representing you, then chuck his advice.

That can be easily fixed with one good earthquake.

I've seen that as well. In severe cases, it results in a depression that allows water to funnel into the wall.

Yeah. On this one, the floor supported 2" of concrete, in which was embedded copper tubing for radiant heating. It was a nice house.

I guess they don't believe in handrails in Cornwall. . .

In the structures that I've seen, the wall framing doesn't support it at all. The loads all run through very large beams and posts. On this house, the walls are just infill. In a few of the NLT construction articles that I've read since Bill's post, I see that some buildings use laminated timber walls to support the laminated timber decks. Also, most interestingly, crews are set to begin constructing a laminated timber high rise in Portland this year. I'll definitely be checking it out as it goes up: http://www.oregonlive.com/business/index.ssf/2017/06/timber_high-rise_planned_in_pe.html

Thanks. That's it. And, yes, it's certainly robust. I see it on most of the small bridges in my area and it's pretty commonly used as decking for elevated garage floors on steep-slope sites, but this was the first time I'd seen it used on a house - for both the floor and the roof. It was, well, robust.

Is there a name for the floor framing system in which you have large girders every so often and span between them with 2x6 boards, oriented vertically, and nailed next to one another like a ginormous horizontal glulam?

Very common. Heck, Rheem/Ruud made the entire draft inducer assembly out of plastic throughout the '90s. . . oops. Bad example. . .

Garet's retired, but he might be able to recommend someone.

. . . and some split bus panels don't allow single pole breakers or tandem breakers in the upper section. See the schematic on the panel; it reveals all.