Q: What happens when you paint latex paint over oil base paint?

A: Simple.  This happens: (This is the Craftsman style bungalow next door we purchased in January.  For other related posts, click on the tag Bungalow) And this:  It appears that someone found a sale on green oil base paint and painted every door and baseboard in this house.  Then, later, a super smart person painted [...]

What Were They Thinking: really bad old house ideas

So…I get up early this morning, 7:00 a.m. to be exact, excited that the carpenter was able to come by today and give me an estimate on porch work that needs to be done.  Everything was going well.  I showed Mike (our carpenter and friend), the porch boards that need to be replaced and the rotted [...]

Spare Bedroom, Before and After

Ah-ha!  I found the realtor walk through picture of the spare bedroom too.  Once I was finished painting the spare bedroom this past November because guests were coming to stay, I looked at the pictures and I did not feel that I really changed the room much at all.  However, this picture reminds me of how ugly [...]

Pictures From the “What Were They Thinking?” Archive

I finally found my realtor walkthrough pictures of our house.  It is interesting to compare before and after pictures of some of the rooms.  I will post them all soon, but here are my absolute favorites….the kitchen before: I don’t know which is worse, the red plastic handles on the cabinets mounted higher than you can [...]

Projects – 2008 in Review

I was sitting around trying to think about what we did all year.  It seems like 2008 was a slow year for us as far as the DIY scene was concerned.  In the early part of the year, around March, we spent a lot of time getting construction bids and filling out mountains of paperwork for [...]

Working on the Attic/Loft

Since we have five more days left of our vacation, Steven decided to continue working on the attic area.  He started pulling up plywood so he could get it ready to blow in some insulation.  We always thought that the plywood was sitting on rafters or beams, but when he started pulling up plywood, this [...]

Ideas for a Craft Room

After making our annual trip to area stores to take advantage of after Christmas sales, Steven and I decided to finish cleaning the “attic” upstairs to get it ready for insulation.  I am not sure if this space was used as an attic, or if it is just unfinished.  There are so many bad PO jobs done to the poor [...]

The Old Fashioned Way

Well, the towel has been thrown in and we have decided to go allllll the way to the drawing board and start over.  We started out only needing around $50-80k in repairs, but by the time the bank was done adding their projects that “would make the house appraise for more” and making us hire [...]