Thumb and Hammer Blog

For the past couple of years, I have been drooling over the European style Runtal radiators (http://www.runtalnorthamerica.com). I like the clean look and modern style. They are a little less common in my area, so there is a certain “wow” factor that would go with having them installed in my house. [...]

I enjoy watching shows like Holmes on Homes and Disaster DIY for two reasons. First, I almost always learn something that I can apply to my own renovations. Second, and I hate to admit it, but there is always a certain level of comfort knowing that as bad as things are in [...]

Thursday morning the tree guy showed up with an assistant and they spent the next 10 hours trimming one tree and removing two others from our front yard. On Friday, he returned to take care of the stumps, which took about 3 hours with the stump grinder. On the positive side, you [...]

My neighbour approached me a couple of weeks ago to tell me that he planned to hire someone to cut off a very large branch of our tree that was rotting and overhanging his property. I guess I could have let him go ahead and do it, and save myself some money in the [...]

With the basement in a reasonable state of order, I finally called the hot water heating specialist for an estimate. He spent a couple of hours here Thursday morning examining our system and drawing up rough plans for the update. This is the same gentleman we called a couple of years ago who [...]

The clean-up in the basement is about half finished.  It should be respectable in a couple more days, so I can finally get the ball rolling on the heating system.  However, the more I clean and organize downstairs, the more problems I uncover.  The moisture problem is a lot more serious than [...]