4renovators

Things have been slow around here in terms of house work. It may be directly proportional to how busy Atticus is: if we could just absorb his energy we might be able to get work done during his nap instead of needing naps ourselves! So what have we accomplished? A little bit, including:removing the rest of the siding from the south side of the ...

So I haven't done much around the house lately. I'm not even sure what my last ''real'' project was. Today I cleared off the concrete countertops and put a new layer of wax on them and polished them. Does that count for home improvement? If I had a free weekend & Atticus was truly old enough to help, what would I do? 1. Sleep. And then ...

I'm still unemployed and have a bunch of free time, so last week I worked on a project I've had on the back burner for a while. Nick's Graphing Mortgage Calculator There are a zillion mortgage calculators on the web, some of which are similar to this one.  Mine is written in Flash, and has a graph that updates to show you the amount of ...

Being unemployed hasn't helped my stress level much, but it's starting to have an effect on the various projects around here: I've got three four window sashes glued up.  nine eight more to go. I glued up two remaining cabinet doors for the kitchen Also the door of the island garbage pull-out Cut, assembled and glued ...

Well, it wasn't a great day.  My company notified me this morning, along with the engineering team I ran, that they decided to lay us off effective immediately and move the positions overseas.  There have been a number of layoffs in the past few months so this didn't come as a huge surprise.  But it was still a ...

A quick update about this topic.  The morning after my previous post on the subject, a man from U.P.S Store HQ contacted me.  He had read my post (is he a Houseblogger?  Is it his job to mine the internet for words like ''U.P.S.'' and ''destroyed''?)  and said he wanted to investigate our claim further.  He passed us off ...

01/18/2008 Update:  I have an update to this post, which I've placed at the end. 01/23/2008 Update:  I've made a second post about this, here. Once upon a time, when I was 3 or 4, my dad made me a workbench.  People are always asking me how I learned to build all the stuff that I do, and I can only attribute my skill to that ...

Nick's got all the pieces cut for the rest of the first floor windows and has done a dry fit. This week he will order the glass and after that comes, he will begin assembling them. I've been thinking about the backsplash in the kitchen and how high I want it to go on the wall next to the stove and in the baking center. I can decide, so we're ...

Or... ''You can never own too many clamps.''   Nick's been busy the past few weeks using up all the salvaged fir we had left.  There's enough wood for the sashes, but we'll have to buy wood for the frames. He glued up all the pieces, put them through the planer, and then cut them to size. He then started milling all the joints and ...

After reading the featrued story on House Blogs by Jeanne ''Built-In... Form and Function'' , I began thinking about what built-ins we have done and which are my favorite. (Or favorite so far, as we've got a lot of house left that we haven't re-furbished.)  So far my favorites are the built-in drawers under the nook seats and the garbage ...