My great grandfather taught my older brother and me to play checkers. You may be from a chess type family, but "Pop" taught me checkers when I was really young.

I was reminded of double jumps, kinged men and not moving backwards this week as I was (and still am …

Here we go...

Opening it up.

The old kitchen.

View from what will be the corner of the kitchen.

Ceilings are mostly scraped.

Trees were also trimmed and or removed as well as stumps ground and we are getting rolling!  You …

Complaining about a few minor delays in the process of building a beautiful home on an almost ideal piece of land that you've been dreaming about for ten plus years would be ridiculous, so that won't happen here or anywhere else for that matter. We plan to start …

Hurry up and wait.  This is a game that we play when we have to wait on city permits, new plats, lenders, weather and our own darn excitement even though almost every ounce of our being wants to tear down the walls and get to the work of building …

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So, the original plan was to remodel the current 1600ft house and resurrect the joke of a converted garage (400ish square feet more) to legitimate status and then possibly add on down the road.  Well, we sold the heck out of our existing house and pushed our cash budget …

Glorious clear to close!

We got the clear to close last night for our house purchase of the new place and it should finally be ours later this week. The absolute circus of appraisal issues that we just navigated would make for a multiple volume set of excruciatingly boring yet …

Two days of rain when we were supposed to finally complete the lender required repairs.  The lender gave us the green light on exactly what needs to be done, so once the weather clears up (hopefully Thursday) we will point and tuck cracks in the brick and paint …

As we wait for the bank to give us the final word on exactly which repairs will be required (in addition to leveling the foundation and scraping, sanding, painting and replacing rotted wood on the garage), I am working on talking the city into letting me file my paperwork for …

Our massive renovation/addition project has raced to an early start as the lender is requiring some repairs before closing and I've agreed to do them in exchange for a discount on our purchase price from the seller/previous owner.

First, we have some leveling of the foundation to …