Although the bath/kitchen renovation was spec’ed out to be a 6-8 week project at the most, and started back in late January, the last 10% of work has been dragging on for months. In the meantime, one of the few fully functional things in the kitchen is the sink and faucet. So I [...]

I’ve been having a problem with my Flickr Photo Album plugin–when selecting photos with the plugin to appear in a post it seems some are replaced with a “This Photo is Currently Unavailable” error image.  This would happen even though the photos are available.
After much research I learned that this error happens when you update [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

I have a newfound appreciation for nice yards after the past year.  The truth is, in the past I never really even noticed the “boring” plants like shrubs, groundcover and evergreens.  I certainly didn’t know much about planning a yard or landscaping project other than to know what I aesthetically liked, and even that wasn’t well-formed.  When [...]

So far I’ve been using the following tool to manage this renovation project:
Google Docs Spreadsheet

For collecting a log of which contractors and which suppliers I’ve contacted, when, and the results. This is crucial for keeping track of who you need to follow up with.
For listing all the work that needs to be done in detail.  [...]