Mad, Beautiful Ideas
Home Ownership The DIY-Way

My wife, Catherine, and I have finally had a chance to move into the Condo we bought two months ago. Needless to say, I'm exhausted today, but the reason it's taken so long for us to get our stuff into this place is simply the sheer amount of work we needed to do.

We had to replace the carpet, with a beautiful hardwood floor, including new trim. We had to repaint the walls (which has been painted with a really lousy paint). I had to fix the toilet which started leaking last week after the place had been empty for eighteen months. We had to replace the curtains, which smelled as bad as the ugly carpet, as the previous owner had apparently smoked cigars regularly in the space. This list seems short, but there are many smaller projects that I can't really name at the moment. Worse, it pales in comparison to all the other projects that we want to do.

Black and Decker Photo Guide to Home RepairMonday has generally been my 'sustainability' posts, which I hope to be able to talk more about in the future as we settle into the new place, but I'm going to be working in posts about the repairs and additions that we make into our new condo. My parents had given me the Black and Decker Complete Photo Guide to Home Repair which has helped be a guide to many of the projects that we've taken on, and certainly many more we will be. It's a good guide, and I'd recommend it based on my experience with it.

Some coming posts I have regard said broken toilet, freeing heavily rusted pipe fittings, replacing a bathroom ceiling fan, some wiring stuff. Really, I've got an insane amount of work I want to do, and no doubt, each new project will result in a new post here. This is still, and will remain, a primarily technology blog. But this content has a place as well, and I certainly hope it will help someone else.