Skipping Town

The patio edged its way to the top of our list of areas of our house we could no longer tolerate. Andrew, in particular, was driven to distraction by the overgrown bushes and other messiness, all of which seemed to harbor armies of mosquitos. A couple of weekends ago, he cleared an entire corner of our yard of scraggly weeds and wild Rose of Sharons, and he chopped down all the bushes around the patio. We had a mountain of yard waste, many many stumps, and dirt still studded with roots. So we hired a tree guy to take care of all that. Once we were more or less back to zero, Andrew spent this weekend leveling the new clear areas, spreading sand, laying pavers, and clearing out still more overgrowth. We were doing this on a shoestring, since a professional patio will be part of our big kitchen renovation next year. Still, although Andrew nearly killed himself with many days of hard labor, the new patio is pleasant and pretty and feels more like ours than the inherited, overgrown one di...

Our house has a lot of space. Much of the space, like the uninsulated sleeping porch and wood-walled room in the attic, is only somewhat useable. The “rec room” in the basement, though a large, appealing extra space, has been completely unusable for various reasons, namely crumbling asbestos tiles and all around dismalness. Itching for another DIY, and needing some runaround space for the girls during the winter, we decided to tackle this room as our next project last month. Painting the wood paneling and the ceiling was pretty easy. We also painted the bureau thing that covers up the water and gas meters, which stick out of the wall. But then we had to address the asbestos-tiled floor. First, we talked ourselves into just carpeting or tiling over it. But some research led us to believe that this wasn’t the safest choice, since many of the tiles were already broken. Andrew sent a sample away for testing, and the asbestos was confirmed. So we decided we had to have the tiles profess...

When we moved in, our house was pretty much left as nice as it could be. Everything was freshly painted, and the wood floors had been refinished. There wasn’t much the sellers could do about the ancient kitchen or second-floor bathroom, which need to be gutted. But you got the sense that they’d done what they could to make this house appealing to people like us—ready to fall in love with a real gem of a home, and willing to put in some work. Then…you get to the attic. There, you get the sense that the sellers just threw up their hands and prayed the rest of the house would carry its deadweight. The attic is kind of a mess. There’s one really great wooden room, billed as a bedroom and ideal for an office or playroom someday, once it gets insulated. There’s a large raw storage space. There’s also a guest bedroom and guest bathroom, and it’s in these rooms that Rochester would have found ample comfort for his insane wife. The guest bedroom is a DIY project for another time, so I’l...

We have no DIY experience. We own a small toolset, a drill with a cord, and a cordless drill. That’s it. Our house came with an elaborate workbench in the basement, along with a large selection of nails, bolts, and other misc., but it has yet to be used for anything but piling things on top of. I say all this by way of introducing the next few posts I’ll write here, highlighting the DIY projects we’ve completed so far. I’ve taken lots of before-and-after pictures, but I haven’t yet put them together. So, here we go, with DIY #1: The Sleeping Porch, which we undertook at the end of the summer. “I didn’t expect this part to be so…difficult.” If we’d been featured on the HGTV show Renovation Realities, this comment from Andrew would have flashed onto the screen, immediately after an arresting image: Andrew and me in our painting clothes, winter scarves tied tightly around our mouths and noses, the “sleeping porch” we were attempting to renovate barely visible in a swirl of whi...