At the back of the house we have an addition that was built sometime in the 1970’s. We call this room the “staging area”, but eventually it will be a library/entertainment room and a small laundry/utility room. The room is a nice, useful size but had some problems: The north wall is about 20 feet long and had 3 inches…
In the area behind the house we have a fairly large cinderblock storage building. It’s built reasonably well, but there is one critical feature missing in this building that prevents it from being called a garage…and from being particularly useful: a large door. Time to fix that. As you can see from the pictures, whoever built the building put two…
Our primary source of heat in the house is a wood stove. It works well, and the cost of firewood is pretty reasonable (about $300 per cord split and delivered.) The old insulation and windows in the house make it slightly challenging to keep warm, though, and last winter it took almost three full cords of wood to heat the…
Hanging off the back of the house is a structure that could be called a porch. It’s not very stable, though (it was previously supported by the cistern I removed a couple of years ago) and the roof leaked enough that it didn’t serve much of a function anymore, so I went to my default action: get rid of it:…
Our house was originally built with one chimney (the white chimney in the center of the roof), and a second chimney and fireplace in the living room was added later. The original chimney hasn’t been used for many years and is in disrepair: Strangely, this chimney comes down from the roof and ends up in the downstairs bathroom: The hole…
Yes, you read that right. We had an old septic tank on the property that wasn’t connected to anything useful. Whoever installed it did a pretty bad job (the inflow pipe wasn’t actually connected to anything coming out of the house), and my guess is the tank was abandoned right after installation because it didn’t work, but who knows. However…
Looking for a hobby to distract us from all of the projects and work my wife and I were bouncing around the idea of making and selling goat cheese. It seemed like a nice excuse to get some interesting animals and maybe earn a little extra money. A friend of ours in town had some goats he said he could…
When we bought the house our propane tank in the back yard was sitting on four rocks instead of a more traditional concrete slab. The rocks had settled over the years so weren’t level anymore (assuming they were ever level), so we decided to remedy the situation by pouring a small concrete slab for the tank to sit on and…
After removing the drop-ceiling from the living room we found a large crack that ran the entire length of the living room ceiling. This was originally caused by a roof leak where the porch met the house, but the leak had been fixed before we bought the house. The crack was pretty ugly, not to mention that it let a fair…
The living room closet we have in this house is small and not terribly useful. It seems like it was really more of an effort to hide the stairs and the vent pipe for the wall heater than an actual storage space. The closet has about 5 feet of heater vent pipe running through it, and the pipe gets pretty…