One Cobble at a Time

Deck Demolition the Final Chapter

When we were tearing apart the deck on Saturday, parts of the process made noise. (Hitting a crowbar with a sledge hammer does that.) Several interested neighbors came by to see what the project was. One did even more than that. He asked how we planned to haul away the wreckage. When we confessed that […]

Deck Update

I am so very tired, but I completed what I hoped to do. We now have a small deck with salvaged railing. Obviously we still have a lot of clearing away work on the old deck. Not mention the massive pile of rotted wood which now sits in my driveway awaiting a trip to the […]

Demolishing the Deck

Some time before we bought our house, a previous owner built a redwood deck in the back yard. I took these pictures of it three years ago when we made a family project out of pressure washing and re-staining it. Look at how lovely it was. Particularly note the even-ness of the deck planks. Having […]

Learning to Divide the Load

At 2am this morning I had a brilliant opening sentence for this blog post. My brain worked, crafted, and whittled to make sure I had a sentence that was balanced and clever. Of course at that hour I was attempting to be asleep and so I did not get up and write it down. Naturally […]

Re-organizing My Office, Again.

When we remodeled my office a couple of years ago, it was my intention to create a space that was both lovely and functional. It worked, mostly. But then we acquired a warehouse and the room which used to be my storage and shipping room became Kiki’s home-visiting-from-college bedroom. In the shift, a whole category […]

Renewing My Spaces

Every so often we would look at our walls and say “We really need to repaint.” Sometimes the words were triggered by corners where the paint had completely chipped away, other times it was contemplating the way that dirt collected on the sections of walls in front of the studs, thus creating a grid pattern […]

Painting the Front Room

January is a cold month with far too little daylight, so I try to fill it with fun projects. That way I blink and it is over. This is our front room. It hasn’t been painted since before we moved into the house. We’ve found it fascinating that the dirt accumulates differently depending upon whether […]

I Have a Library

Some dreams shine brightly right in front of our eyes. They are the big shiny possibilities which pull us forward and cause us to despair because they are so far beyond our reach. Other dreams are quiet. They exist in the backs of our brains and we pay them no attention until that moment when […]

Shelving Project

In theory I can plan a home improvement project, do the math, make a list, and take a single trip to the store for supplies. So far my two-day-old shelving project has required one trip for boards and brackets, a second trip for screws and sandpaper, then a third trip to return sandpaper and buy […]

I Keep My Brain in My Office

I am very tired today and I have learned an important thing about myself; I store parts of my brain function in the organizational structure of my house. Once I got the correct desk installed in my office and set up my computer on it, much of my inability to prioritize vanished. This effect increased […]