The Thumb & Hammer Blog

I make absolutely no apologies for not doing any work whatsoever on the house over the last week. It took a while to adjust to a regular schedule again, after having so much time away from my job. And, as I said in my previous entry, it is going to take a while for my [...]

With the recreation room in the basement now 98% gutted, yet another structural issue has been revealed. Once again, the previous owner messed around with main structural supporst without having a clear understanding of what he was doing. In his defence, he did attempt to do something the right way, but as usual, he came [...]

Demolition continued in the basement over this past weekend, though I only worked for about 4 hours each day. As I removed the drywall and strapping to uncover the block walls, I also uncovered further mysteries and potential problems. It is difficult for me to see anything but dollar signs at this point, and those [...]

The last couple of days have not been good. I have been feeling overwhelmed again, and my thoughts have been stuck in “what if” mode. If only it was possible to go back in time. I would certainly go back three and a half years to the time before we bought this house. But time [...]

A road trip and a day at an amusement park was an ideal family vacation. It’s hard to be two places at the same time, so all demolition and renovation was on hold from Wednesday to Friday. Most of Monday was spent running errands and getting groceries and on Tuesday, I cut the lawn for [...]