Several months ago we settled on a basic kitchen design. Since the carport permits pushed out the start time out, and I was sent a few inspirational photos, I took another crack at some design options. Here are the 3 design options we’re looking at:
1. Original
   
2. Stove on the Side Wall
  [...]

Just in case anyone is interested in seeing the kinds of plans the City needs to see in order to get a building permit, here they are (it took me about 3 days of solid work to understand the requirements, survey the property and use CorelDraw to create the plans):

Permit Combined – Upload a Document to [...]

A question that I keep getting asked is will I be getting a permit for Job XYZ.  I always thought that was odd.  Why wouldn’t I get a permit?
Well, now I know. 
I applied to City Hall a few weeks back for a building permit to replace my badly weather damaged carport roof.  Today I got [...]

Several weeks ago I was pretty psyched about finding a couple great old doors and a fantastic old double hung window for a tiny fraction of what they would have cost new.
The honeymoon is long since over. I’ve spent weeks with chemicals and heat guns stripping the several layers or latex and oil and whatever [...]

We had the world’s greatest tenant in our Gastown condo for the past year and a half.  But now she’s moving on.  So we were faced with the decision to rent it again or sell it.  After a lot talking, we decided that it would be better to sell it.  We don’t really have the time [...]

Thanks to Firefox, Wordpress lost my original post.  I know the fanboys love FF, but through death by a thousand cuts, I keep learning this lesson:  Don’t use FireFox.  From poor stability with flash files, to losing my place when opening new windows, to losing Wordpress posts, FF gives me more trouble than even lousy [...]

As mentioned earlier, we had some reliability trouble with the first renovation contractor we started working with (he promised answers to questions by certain dates and then never delivered on time, which made me worried about how he would be with real work).  It took over several weeks for me to find him and I [...]