When we moved into our new house, we were downsizing a bit. Until we get around to finishing the basement, the finished space will be about 60% of our old house. It is nice to have less house to work on and clean, but we were anxious about storage space…
Category: Home Improvement
Projects done to improve, decorate, or repair parts of a house.
House project blog: kitchen cabinets
This was a long time ago now, but we have been too busy on uninteresting repair projects for me to be able to keep up with blogging. I started writing this near the end of last year, when our kitchen was nearly done. We have been living with it at…
House project blog: really good contractors
This project was huge, and it required so much work that there was no way I could have gotten it done myself. We hired a general contractor to demolish the ceiling, build the new wall, and redo the electrical wiring in the kitchen, while I focused on removing the existing…
Door handle wall bumper
I was looking around our house for things to fix, and I saw a lot of places where there was a small hole in the drywall caused by a door handle. I was going to patch all of these with drywall, but I knew it would eventually happen again, even…
Re-tiling guest bathroom shower
I decided to re-tile our guest bathroom myself and hire a refinishing company to refinish the bathtub. I finished this project about a month ago, but I’ve been too busy at the other house to write it up until now.
House project blog: take it apart
I’m falling behind on blog posts about house projects. There has been a lot going on, and we have been making quite a bit of quick progress. Starting a couple weeks ago and ending last week I have been working on demolishing our new kitchen. The cabinets were old and…
No-turn dummy doorknob adapter
Closet doors are often built with dummy doorknobs that look and feel like a normal doorknob without the internal pieces that would rotate and move a latch. They usually look just like the normal handle but they can only be installed on a door without a hole because you use…
Wiring the whole house for Ethernet
Over the last month or so I have been working on routing data cables through our house so that every room is connected to a switch, router, and modem in our basement utilities room. It was a lot of work, but the result is that we now have 2 RJ45…
Bedroom refinishing
At the end of last year we fixed some issues that had been bothering us in our bedroom. We stripped the popcorn off our bedroom ceiling, repainted everything, and replaced all the trim. This is the second room we have done this in now, and I didn’t initially intend to…
Player piano preventive maintenance
We have a Yamaha player piano that I have been using off and on for around 15 years. It needed some work to maintain the hammers and make sure it can record correctly.