Last fall, Dave was feeling run down. Nothing specific, just a general tired feeling. We were remodeling this new house and showing our house on Main St. and we were under a lot of stress. It made sense. Between Christmas and New Year’s Dave was too sick to work. That was the start of a…
Life has been difficult. That is such a simple sentence but what is going on is far from simple. David has been off work since Christmas. His back hurt and he just did not feel well. After repeated doctor’s visits he was referred to ortho. They advised him to get his shoulder reworked. He was…
The garage is finally done! The construction did not go as smoothly as we had hoped. Here’s what happened: Site Prep for the Pole Barn/Garage A load of stone was delivered and spread over the site and the materials arrived earlier than expected. I arrived on site at 7am but they were already there. There…
The studio had been used as our staging area for construction for the rest of the house. Now it needs to be completed because our closing is scheduled for next Friday. We will have only 30 days after that to be out of our old house. I am still teaching and doing business in the…
Here’s a video recap of the four days of demolition. It was a huge amount of work but we got through it as planned. Just a few weeks later Cleary’s subcontractor got to work prepping the site with a load of stone. We got a bump in the construction schedule and work began the same…
We’re building a new garage! I’ve never lived in a house with a garage. My home on Main Street has a building we call a garage but the widest door is a double door just off the alley that is only five feet wide. You’d never get a car in there. The building had a…
One of the oddest features of this house was that it only had one door when we bought it. Not only is it inconvenient, it just did not feel right. We decided we needed a door at the back of the house in the studio. This would create two doors in the studio, but most…
This is one of those ideas where you wonder, “Why didn’t I think of this before?” I’m still struggling with my kitchen design. Working with a designer did not work out for me. I don’t want a row of cabinets slapped up on a wall. I want a thoughtful, workable design and I cannot afford…
Nothing feels better than seeing progress. The insulation behind the drywall feels pretty darn good also. Unfortunately, the north wall (the one without insulation) had to stay that way for several weeks. We had to wait until the new electrical service was inspected and switched over by Edison so we could then demo the wires,…
I thought I could live with the living room after giving it a coat of paint. We could concentrate on other areas and tackle this room later . . . or so I thought. I tried a bit of paint, but I could not ignore that ceiling and no amount of paint was going to…
I designed our kitchen on Main St., but I just cannot come up with a plan for this house. I’ve decided to get some help. Our existing kitchen on Main St. I think I did a good job on our existing kitchen. It’s been in place since about 1992 or so. I recently added the…
Getting a well going that had been abandoned for at least a year was relatively easy, keeping it going was much harder. Before you buy land in the country, ask the neighbors or a water purification contractor what the water is like in your area. Our realtor had tipped us off that the water on…