Perception of the passage of time is relative - time flies when your having fun. It is difficult to believe that we worked on this drystack stone fireplace for about 17 months at intervals. We started in January 2007, and then I provided updates at some intervals along the way. At the One year point, [...]
Standing on the third section of scaffold, I’m within about two feet of the top of the chimney and just past the 90% mark on the project. I’m well over the hump of disillusionment that usually creeps in around the 50% point where it feels like I have been working forever on something and as far [...]
The stonework I once thought could be done in 30 days is now at something like day 415 largely as a result of demands on my time from my day job, other obligations, and a healthy dose of procrastination.
The fireplace and chimney has slowly gathered aesthetic appeal and visual mass as the work progresses, and now passing the 80% [...]
This time last year, I started work on my 21 foot high, 6 foot wide fireplace and chimney that I’m doing in “Buck’s County” drystack ledgestone. At the time I began, I thought perhaps this project would take a month, two at the outside. Back in July, I provided the last update on the project and was only [...]
This project is taking far longer than I expected when I started around the first of the year, as with most of my complex projects, I completely underestimated the amount of time required. I originally told my self, I would knock this out in a month, reasoning that I had about 20 feet of stone [...]
In the course of winding up our new home construction last September, I had to make some trade offs in terms of what we would get to finish, and how the money got spent. I wiped out the entire finish carpentry budget to help mitigate some cost overruns in other areas, and as a result, [...]
Cross one more off the list of things I need to complete in order to call our home “finished”. When we started working with an architect in spring of 2004, to design our home, we were fairly sure about many things including the type of construction and the overall style and appearance of the [...]
Saturday was sunny and mild, and offered a reprieve from the winter doldrums. As such, I found outside projects to work on, replacing a leaking valve cover gasket on Leslie’s Audi A4, visiting with co-worker Tim, who dropped by for a visit, along with his girlfriend, Katharyn. After a tour of our house, still in progress, [...]
This simple inductive tester is really helpful in debugging home wiring problems, and doubles as a quick safety check to ensure no power is present on a wire or fixture before putting tools to it. The stock picture above shows the tool working (lights up and sounds a tone when it detects electricity) by being stuck into [...]
The good news is that over time, the daily page views of my blog is growing. The bad news is that roughly 2/3 of the traffic comes from keyword searches related to the various topics I write about. So, perhaps 1/3 of the people that visit my blog do so deliberately. While my end objective [...]
