I hadn’t yet posted a full set of before pics, so here goes. Ready yourself for thoughts/emotions somewhere within the underwhelmed-to-horrified spectrum. Nighttime viewing is not recommended. If it gets too intense, please, just look away and think of puppies. I want you to have a happy New Year.
Let’s start with the heart of the [...]

We started casually entertaining the idea of buying a house at the end of October 2008, about a month after the economy of Earth fell into a burning cauldron of hellfire. People like us just fluttered our fingers Montgomery Burns style and muttered, “Excellent”. See, we had been saving money, but not as fast as [...]

Back in, oh, 2007, the previous owners decided that grass just wasn’t their bag. What was their bag, you ask? – 119,000 pounds of concrete.
Yipee!

We moved to California from NYC. We have had enough of concrete. Out it must come. (Here’s our endgame for the Upper Yard that we detailed a few posts back.)
Enter sledgehammer, [...]

The first project that we were going to tackle was a hydronic radiant heating system. This entails pulling up the wood floor (which is in bad shape due to numerous strange patch jobs for various heating systems over the years), repairing the subfloor, having the radiant heat installed, and pouring an inch to inch-and-a-half self-leveling [...]