April 2005 - Posts
This weekend should bring a lot of change around our house. After the appraisal is done on Saturday, Nick will be taking down the cabinets and storing all the wood for future projects. I'll be planting the new plants in the garden and arranging our in-between
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Wow, I can hardly believe our own progress this week. We started on Sunday with the new kitchen , Tuesday with the electrical inspection and progress dismantling the kitchen cabinets , and now yesterday we made progress on the financial side: I spoke
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I'm watching Nick take the doors and hardware off the kitchen cabinets. This will stop us from opening the cupboards to find something, only to remember that everything is in the dining room on the tall metal cart. We've cooked two basic meals (spaghetti
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Oh, I’m sooo excited. We finished the electrical service upgrade a few weeks ago , but the remaining nagging item was to call the inspector. Yesterday I used the city website to schedule the inspection, and stayed home this morning to be here when he
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Where do I begin? Tonight was my last landscape design class. I knew going into it, that I wouldn't be done with my plan by the end of the four weeks. There have been moments where I think I know where I'm headed, followed by valleys of despair. How will
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True to our plan , we hosted a party on Saturday night and began packing up the kitchen on Sunday morning. We woke up Sunday, drank our coffee, and headed to Costco and Home Depot for a storage rack and storage crates. The crates are numbered and their
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Here are the results of last week's poll : nearly a quarter of us (23%) are funding our projects paycheck-to-paycheck, and nearly half of us (48%) are using a combination of savings and income. Five folks (16%) are using any and all means to get cash
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I'm only slightly embarrassed to show these on the Internet. Mom sent them to me for my birthday in an envelope titled "House Renovating is Fun!" I'm fairly certain these are from my folk's kitchen remodel. I still do this after a successful project:
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We’re having a party on Saturday night, with about 30 people coming over. I think this is likely the most people we’ve had over at once. Officially it’s a birthday party, but unofficially it’s a pre-demo party. Once the party’s over, our plan is to begin
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One of the many reasons I like our blog (and others like it) is that it makes me feel so much less isolated as a DIY remodeler. None of my friends are remodeling their homes, and while they're always interested in hearing my stories, they usually aren't
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I couldn't sleep last night. Too many thoughts about: Tearing up the fir floors. Where to stack the wood? New beam between the dining room and kitchen. How heavy will it be? Where should I order it from? Boiler installation. Can I do it myself? New plumbing
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I was a little mad at myself all weekend. On Friday I ordered a sample tilt-jambliner from Blaine Window & Hardware. (This is a pretty neat company, and friendly too!) My plan is to retrofit our existing cottage-style double hung windows with new
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Last week’s poll asks “Where do you get your DIY remodeling skills?” Obviously there are a lot of sources for learning, and our limited answer set barely begins to scratch the surface. Jeannie from House in Progress suggested that she learns a lot from
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I'm just about ready to place an order for new double-hung window balances, for our window retrofit project. To place the order, I need to know the weight of the sash that the balance will support. I know the existing weight of the sash (it's about 30lbs),
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This was the main message during the landscape design this week. We made a huge list of what we would like to use our yards for: eating, entertaining, relaxing, privacy, play, etc... Now we are supposed to think about how we can meet the different functions
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The plan all along has been to install radiant floor heating. It's still the plan, but yesterday we got an eye opener when I called the local installer who quoted over 15 G's for the boiler room and $14 / square foot for running the tubing. Ouch! In my
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WOW – thanks to a mid-week splurge we had 39 votes this week! The poll results are mixed: the most common first remodeling project is painting, at 28%. A few of us (15%) have been busy ensuring our houses won’t fall down, and an equal number decided to
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Not to mention the dandelions. As I attacked the back yard jungle today, I was wondering what would happen if you didn't pull out all those nasty dandelions. Would a field of little yellow flowers really be that bad? My goal was to put on my hiking boots
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There is a corner of the kitchen linoleum that keeps peeling back a bit more and more. So far it’s only exposed some sub flooring. The kitchen floor is higher than the rest of the flooring, so I’m wondering what is under the linoleum. Is it just a sub
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We're midway through the week here, with only 15 votes... Come on lurkers, it's up to you! Click, click, is all it takes. If you vote 'Other', leave a comment and let us know what your first renovation project was. Even if you haven't started your projects
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I can become a landscape architect...maybe. Recently I signed up for a landscape design class at the community college down the street, and last night was the first of four classes. The instructor is a landscape architect and has been teaching the class
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A couple of weeks ago my folks were visiting from Wisconsin. Normally I would have put my dad to work on the house, but this was a short romantic get-away weekend for them, and besides, Dad just retired in January. I figured I’d give him a break until
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Actually it already began about 4 years ago. Today however marks a new era in our renovation: we are now without a roommate! Justin, my longtime friend and roommate, moved out yesterday to a new place with less construction dust. We’ll miss him, to be
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Our first floor has a total of seven double hung windows in the dining and living rooms. They’re cottage style, meaning that the top windows are shorter than the bottom. I really want to rehab these windows to have double-pane glass, and a more effective
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The results are in! Nearly half of us (48%) are young and hip - 30 and under, and the greater half (53%) of us are older, wiser, and clearly still hip. None of us are mathematicians and so none of us will realize that the total adds up to 101%. (I’ll
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Last week I blogged about our sewer’s propensity for backing-up on holidays like Thanksgiving and Easter. We now know exactly why it was doing that, and we believe it won’t be happening again. This week we gave our sewer system bypass surgery; that is,
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