So far I’ve spent my sec­ond day of fur­lough catch­ing up on var­i­ous items around the house. I need to get back into the habit of writ­ing here a bit more fre­quently. I keep think­ing of things that are worth post­ing, but never actu­ally sit­ting down to do so. A bunch of exte­rior work is being done on my […]

While I was watch­ing the Celtics/​Bulls game, some­one set fire to the aban­doned build­ing just cater­corner from me on Holm­den Court (the alley behind my house). Either the fire started back up around 3am or the arson­ist came back to fin­ish the job because the street was clogged with fire trucks. This is the sec­ond arson […]

The last cou­ple of days have been great. Good weather after a seem­ingly end­less win­ter does that, I guess. Fri­day I got to work from home for the major­ity of the day since we were shoot­ing a video for the Solid Waste Dis­trict about the proper ways to dis­pose of latex paint. The night before, my new neigh­bor needed […]

A month or so ago I stopped into the down­town Fifth Third to inquire about the pos­si­bil­ity of refi­nanc­ing my mort­gage. Now that rates have dropped I fig­ured it was a good time to test the waters. I was told that I’d have to pay into the mort­gage a bit more before I was eli­gi­ble, but that I’d get a call when […]

With all of the stuff I’ve been up to lately, doing a bit of writ­ing has fallen by the way­side. Work on the house is still incom­plete, but has slowed down because what remains isn’t crit­i­cal quite yet. Once all of the paint­ing is com­plete, and I’ve man­aged to get all of the doors rehung, there […]

Although I’ve taken the last two weeks off of work to spend time with Abra­ham, I’ve also been doing [and hav­ing done] a lot of work on the house. I’ve been work­ing on the room that you enter from the front door. For lack of a bet­ter term, I call it the par­lor. Here are some phở­tos: Before: […]

I’ve lived in this house for almost a year and I’m still not moved in. The work on fix­ing the place up con­tin­ues, and tomor­row the embiggen­ing of the bath­room and closet [to the dearth of the tini­est bed­room] begins. Since we’re in the process of paint­ing the entry room, this means that 4 of the rooms […]

There are some good inter­ac­tive util­i­ties out there for deter­min­ing hous­ing afford­abil­ity based upon var­i­ous met­rics. The Cen­ter for Neigh­bor­hood Tech­nol­ogy has a Hous­ing + Trans­porta­tion Afford­abil­ity Index and the New York Times has a cal­cu­la­tor that deter­mines whether it is bet­ter to rent or buy based upon selec­table cri­te­ria. There’s also WalkScore, which deter­mines the walkability […]

I don’t know why this wasn’t pub­lished a cou­ple of days ago. The new ver­sion of Word­Press has some weird bugs in it. Life at home this week has been a flurry of task-​dragon slay­ing. Every Thurs­day I clean a bit of the shed out back, pil­ing up tow­ers of junk on the curb for scrap­pers and the fan­tas­tic Cleveland […]

Yes­ter­day was a bit of a wash in terms of accom­plish­ment. I had some appli­ances deliv­ered ass-​early in the morn­ing, which turned out to be excel­lent, because by 9am I was at the hos­pi­tal with Deb­bie. She’d been hav­ing erratic con­trac­tions all night and since she’s 32 weeks along Colleen our mid­wife had us come in for a checkup. Turns […]

Forked over for some plant life this week­end. For the most part my yard takes care of itself, daf­fodils and tulips bloom­ing every­where and the roses start­ing their warm-​up set. I had to repot some sort of suc­cu­lent that I pur­chased in the depths of win­ter for my office, it is doing much bet­ter split between two […]

Took a first look at my spring­time yard today, since it was so nice out. Last fall I delib­er­ately didn’t rake any leaves, and the result­ing piles acted as nat­ural mulch on the lilies and other flora that are start­ing their pri­mav­era growth. The thorny rose stalks are even begin­ning to bud. I picked up a few bags of […]

Not only did my crazy yelling neigh­bor get evicted, but the dude that lives upstairs, a relaxed and friendly guy, just got taken away by the cops on sus­pi­cion of gun pos­ses­sion. Based on what his dis­traught girl­friend was yelling from the bal­cony, some­one gave a false report about it and she blamed the folks who live […]

I decided to go ahead and put my new design out there in its 40% done state. Hav­ing to see it when­ever I look at my site should encour­age me to fin­ish it up. I’m using one of Eric Meyer’s reset styles as the base, and build­ing from it. Even­tu­ally I hope to go through each post […]

A few weeks ago when I installed a dim­mer in the mas­ter bed­room, I was heart­ened to see that the wall box had a ground wire in it, wait­ing to be hooked up. I hoped that this was a good sign for the rest of the house, which has ungrounded sock­ets. Unfor­tu­nately, tonight when I tried to change a socket, there was no […]

This week­end I dropped a few grand on hard­wood floor­ing. Yikes. I looked into buy­ing the sus­tain­able bam­boo stuff, but it was twice as expen­sive as engi­neered hard­wood. I have been paint­ing with Sherwin-​Williams’ Har­mony paint though. It has no VOC and is anti-​microbial in addi­tion. I’m halfway done paint­ing another room as well. I need to get all this […]

Last night at 4am I was awak­ened by the worst alter­ca­tion I’ve heard yet from my moon-​struck neigh­bors. The crazy lady yells at her man on a nearly daily basis; “fuck this, fuck that, fuck­ety fuck fuck, like Samuel L. in Pulp Fic­tion. She is so loud that she can wake me up when there are no […]

In other gym-​related news, there is this dude who I’ve seen at the gym since I started going there that never lifts weights. He dicks around the entire time, almost always look­ing at him­self in the mir­ror and going through the motions of lift­ing weights, set­ting up the bar, adjust­ing seat heights, switch­ing out han­dles and […]

My first mort­gage pay­ment was made the other day. Out of the hun­dreds of dol­lars I paid, less than $68 actual went to the prin­ci­pal bal­ance, the rest dis­ap­peared into the vast realm of inter­est. It is going to be tough check­ing my bank account online and watch­ing the bal­ance dink lower. Work on the house […]

I’m work­ing on refin­ish­ing the floor in what will be my mas­ter bed­room once the floor is refin­ished. And other sundry stuff taken care of as well. Any­way, the refin­ish­ing was going fine until I hit this strange spot where the strip­per refuses to work. It won’t soften the paint or any­thing. I put up a ques­tion on […]

Ren­o­vat­ing a house is a bit like tak­ing the clothes off of a woman; there always seems to be one more layer. Today I was walk­ing to the kitchen for some break­fast when noticed a cor­ner curl of wall­pa­per stick­ing away from the wall. “Pull me”, it said. I pulled. The whole sheet of wall­pa­per came off like a bra on Mardi […]

I’m spend­ing my 4^th of July soak­ing the din­ing room floor with water and scrap­ing up the linoleum that was under the car­pet and over the hard wood floors. I’ve been pulling sta­ples and nails out of the floors for a cou­ple of days, one room at a time and was get­ting quite dusty and hack­ing a bit […]

The day after I got the keys to my house the pre­vi­ous owner showed up unex­pect­edly and invited him­self inside. He’s an old Lebanese dude, and very attached to the house. I prob­a­bly could have got­ten $5k less on the price if they hadn’t felt so sen­ti­men­tal about the place. Any­way, this guy told me he’d show […]

On Thurs­day I became a home­owner! What a frig­gin process it was though. I’ll go into more detail with that in a fur­ther post. Right now I’m enjoy­ing my cur­rent dis­as­ter area. I pulled out all the car­pet, padding and tack­board stuff that evening, so the floors are a bit rough right now. The wall­pa­per is old and nicotine-​stained, and the […]