I have to admit that I am a sucker for hardwood floors, but having hardwood flooring installed is expensive. So when my wife and I discovered hardwood floors underneath the carpet of our 1950’s home, we were overjoyed. I mean, “refinishing” an existing hardwood floor is hundreds of dollars cheaper than having new hardwood installed. Sounds pretty peachy am I right? I mean how hard can it be to refinish a hardwood floor? Well, here’s a handful of things that I ran into while I refinished our floors: (more...)

Regardless of how much work you do on your home, a few simple tools can save you a lot of time and money. You don’t need to build a fence to justify owning a hammer…hanging a picture will do just fine. (more...)

Before I go in detail about how poor some of the “how to” knowledge is at my nearby home improvement store, let me praise them for having the tools and supplies that I need 99% of the time. I’ve chosen this story as my opening post partly because I think it’s helpful, partly because I think it is a good story, but mostly because I don’t want to sound like a darn Home Depot spokesman in my future posts.

With that said, my bother owns a few rental houses (the poor guy). One night he calls me up and says that he’ll pay me to help fix a bathtub leak. Sounded like a good deal to me until I found out what I was really getting paid for…crawling under the house. (more…)