Some years I can get through an entire year without having a plumber replace something. It turns out 2023 is not one of those years. Today, our regular plumber sent two guys out to ( Read more... )

Last fall, we paid to get half of our house waterproofed. The goal was to prevent minor seepage that consistently occurred along that side of the house ( Read more... )

I celebrated 16 years in my house by paying off the mortgage. To my surprise, if you look at all the places I have lived, my house is now the one that I've lived in the longest.

In second place is my primary childhood home in North Dakota, which my parents moved out of in 2018 after just shy of 34 years of residence. I personally lived there ( Read more... )

On June 15, I walked into the bank that holds my mortgage and paid off the balance in full. A timeline:

- On January 27, 2007, my bid on my future house was accepted.
- On March 14, 2007, I closed on my house. My initial mortgage was for 30 years at 6+%.
- In 2011, I refinanced to a 15-year mortgage at 4.125%. My payments stayed about the same, ( Read more... )

On Thursday, our waterproofing project was completed. To summarize ( Read more... )

I'm the guy who keeps all the packing materials when items show up in my house. Many of my kitchen devices have a box piled up in the basement, complete with styrofoam padding or assorted internal pieces of cardboard. There was also quite a few boxes from baby things. Not all of the boxes are large; the box for the camera I bought before my trip to ( Read more... )

M is a big fan of plants. She perhaps two dozen plants that spend the summers outside on either the screened porch or on the ground, depending on their sun tolerance. During colder weather, they migrate "south" (inside) into our Florida room. That room is the only room on our first floor that consistently gets decent amounts of sunlight in the ( Read more... )

I am not a particularly handy person. I took several years of shop class in junior high and high school and did fine, but it's not exactly relevant to the kind of odd jobs one finds around the house. I'm not a big fan of watching videos as a method of learning. While I'm pretty relaxed about the failure inherent in learning, I grow rapidly less ( Read more... )

I admit that I didn't expect to be writing about plumbing issues a scant two weeks after we got our new filtration system installed, but when I woke up last Tuesday 4/6 and went downstairs I heard a very loud noise in the basement. I initially thought perhaps the filtration unit was draining, which I was told would happen occasionally and be ( Read more... )

When I was a kid back in North Dakota, we had well water. It tasted fine, but once in a great while during some of the drought years you'd get red water coming through the pipes. The water here in Northeast Ohio comes from Lake Erie, and to me it tastes fine, especially when you compare it to the water in some parts of southern Ohio that I've ( Read more... )