I didn't really have any plans for major home improvements this year. Sure, we upgraded the internet, but that was more of an attack of opportunity, and it didn't involve capital outlay. Naturally, it's the last day of April and we've already bought ourselves most of a new driveway ( Read more... )

I got fiber internet back in 2021. Well, I thought it was fiber. It turns out it was something called copper, or something like that, but it turns out it did a more than good enough job. I wasn't planning to update it, but AT&T finally ran fiber to my neighborhood recently and offered a number of specials to convince people to shift. When they ( Read more... )

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... )

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

Early in the pandemic we had someone from AT&T out to try to resolve some internet issues we had. When our DSL worked, it worked fine. The problem was that it had intermittent moments when it didn't work at all. That repair guy made some tweaks which improved things, but we still occasionally had intermittent problems. As the pandemic continue, the ( Read more... )

When we painted the inside of house, we had to take down all the curtains in the three bedrooms. Since all of those curtains had been there since I bought the house, and quite frankly looked like they might have been homemade by someone with marginal sewing talents, this wasn't necessarily a big loss. We left the pull down shade in the windows in ( Read more... )

The hot water that was in my house when I bought it started to die back in March 2011. When I replaced it in April 2011 I was told that it would last about ten years. It died last night after 9 years and 4 months, so I should have taken the under ( Read more... )

After talking about it for a long time, we have gotten the interior of the house painted. I learned a few things during this process:
- We learned (ok, confirmed) that the contractor we hired to patch dry wall and plaster last year was even less competent than we thought when we opted to not have them paint. Our painter was horrified by the work ( Read more... )