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My greatest victory of the project so far: fixing the one bum circuit in the upstairs. I’ve had only occasional electrical in my living room and two big bedrooms. For some reason it took me a month to figure out that the problem might be caused by one bad connection at the start of the [...]

For some reason I knocked all the tiles off before I demolished the walls. It was sort of fun chiseling them off, but just unnecessary. I suppose I did it that way because all the write-ups I found online talked about knocking tiles off so that they could be reused. In my case, no, I [...]

The kitchen has been opened up. The new gaping hole isn’t finished off at all yet, but still: the kitchen has been opened up. Makes a much bigger difference than the photos can convey — a lot more light gets in there and the kitchen now feels like it’s sort of part of the same [...]

Cost me $4,500 or something crazy, you’d think I’d be willing to take a real photograph of it. It’s probably raining outside though. Or it’s hot. Either way. The new roof is sort of a reddish brown. You can’t really see the color in the photo. Cell phone pic. It’s been weird having people come [...]

My parents came out to visit last week. Was good to have some company, especially company that wanted to spend their time in Pittsburgh working on my house. Here’s a list of some of their accomplishments: Delivered my car to me from San Diego. Got my washing machine drainage pipe to stop leaking. Took out [...]

Posting about Half Dome and Boundary Waters was a lot more engaging. Try it yourself, prove me wrong. (Or right.) Tape ball, before and after: Weight: 0. Weight: equivalent to three rolls of 1 1/2-inch masking tape, three spiders, and a gnat carcass. I kind of like sticking random bug bodies into tape balls. Or at [...]

More like “bad decisions” than “misfortune”. Or maybe more like “difficult, non-binding decisions that could not be made without investment of time and money”. Something like that. It’s taken too long to paint the three rooms I’m painting and part of the deal has been color decisions. Before I moved out here, I was thinking [...]

The best days are the ones when I (a) don’t go to Home Depot and (b) don’t need anything from Home Depot that I’m just kidding myself into trying to do without because I’m tired of going to Home Depot. FWIW: About the third day after I moved into the house, I started getting this [...]

Painting has taken a long time. It will continue to take a long time. I’d never done ceilings before. It turns out a lot of paint falls onto your face, some gets in your eyes, and especially when you’re trying to do it in low light, it’s pretty hard to see what areas you’ve coated [...]

I’m becoming increasingly incredulous that anything I have posted or will post regarding the renovations of my house has been, will be, or will have been interesting. With that in mind, I applied primer to my walls and ceiling prior to painting. That’s right: primer. Kilz is the brand name of the primer. It seals [...]