Wow, when I left off, the basement floor was half finished.  It was a couple of weeks before Christmas, and I had hoped to have all completed before the holiday.  But alas, the household was hit by the virulent H1N1 flu, which took me out of commission for two weeks.

The Monday after Christmas I picked up where I had left off.  I had tiled and ( Read more... )

It has been slow going in the basement, largely because it is much more laborious than I had anticipated! It takes a lot out of me, so if I work on it one day, I need to take a day, sometimes two, off before I can get back to it ( Read more... )

So I have lived with my new oven since November 10, and I have been disliking it more and more and more ( Read more... )

Another bag of mortar down...


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I layed down one mortar bag's worth of tile today, about 50 square feet. Only another 8 or 9 bags to go. The wet saw was fun to use, and so much easier than I had imagined. The hardest part was mixing the mortar. Stuff's very thick. I think I got pretty good, straight lines. I won't really know until it's all said and done. Oh, and I am ( Read more... )

The kitchen is looking great, but there's still a bunch to do. Week before last, I had to go over to Marietta to inspect the slab of granite that they were going to use for my countertop. That was fun. The place is a kitchen cabinet & countertop showroom, but when they take you down into the basement, it's a huge underground warehouse of stone, ( Read more... )

Well, I have been juggling the basement and kitchen projects for the past two weeks, plus squeezing in a visit to North Carolina and dealing with Padma's seizures. That last thing has been about the death of me, because since the seizures started in mid-October, I have rarely had a good or full night's sleep. I sleep very lightly, because all but ( Read more... )

Well, I had been planning to approach the packing of books and dismantling of bookshelves in a more leisurely fashion, so as to take care of my body.  But Hurricane Ida changed all that.  She brought a fresh round of flooding to the basement and garage.  Ironically, the books I had already packed and stacked in the garage were damaged, while the ( Read more... )

On this dreary, rainy morning was scheduled two important pieces of the renovation puzzle: measuring the countertop for the new one, and delivering the oven, which I feared would not fit into the opening because of the gas line sticking up.  I am grateful that, for some reason, the stars aligned and everything fell into place rather perfectly.

The ( Read more... )

One of the reasons I love DIY so much is because I feel like I personally add value to my expenditures. In this current project, for example, I had estimated that Lowe's would charge me about $2500-3000 to put down the tile floor. Well, they sent their guy out last week to measure the area, and today I got the formal estimate from them: $4230 ( Read more... )