Ongoing projects

I love old houses. One particular passion of mine is reading home renovation blogs and following stories of how regular, ordinary folks like us turn trash into treasure. I probably read renovation blogs more than any other type of blog, and if you pull up the favorites links on my computer it's chock full of sites selling things like period lighting, gooseneck faucets, and old, porcelain doorknobs. We constantly pore over French building supply store sites like LaPeyre and Gedimat and a weekend doesn't pass where we aren't in Bricorama spending, spending, spending. Seb and I love it though even if it has completely devoured our social life. We're home improvement geeks and very much proud of it. The smell of new lumber is an aphrodisiac for us.

Since major construction work will be beginning in mid September on the house I've started delving in and updating our renovation blog A Fisherman's House. We're still doing a lot of things ourselves, but after four years of dust and grime and backbreaking labor we've decided to hire a contractor to fast forward ourselves into finishing the second and part of the third floor. The contractor will be installing a full bathroom and renovating the space for two of our three bedrooms. By Christmas we hope to have seventy-five percent of the house finished. That's saying a lot considering only about thirty percent is finished at this point.

Stay tuned for lots of hair pulling out, shrieks of delight, fist pounding on tables and whiny posts about missing screw boxes, noisy drilling and crooked doorjambs. It's sure to be a very stimulating roller coaster ride.