The Home Front

I have been working on things other than my usual gig of writing about and photographing garages, motorcycles, and other guy-stuff (which is what an editor I met with at the ASJA conference dubbed my niche, "Oh," she said as her eyes glazed over disappointedly, "You write about guy stuff").

Right now, the task in front of me is getting my little home in Oakdale up to snuff. So I'm painting, landscaping, and doing all the other things you tell yourself you are going to do when you buy a house and never do until you are thinking about selling the place.

So I'm chronicling that with what I'm calling my Home Improvement Photojournal. I'll be posting progress on the house regularly throughout the process, and you can even subscribe via RSS feed if you go here. And, yes, this also means that friends, family, and neighbors can take this as a good reason to avoid visits (as they are likely as not to end helping me move, paint, or build something) OR they can take into the account the fact that I have about three cases of beer chilling in my garage fridge that I'll happily part with in exchange for a few minutes of labor.

This process began when I bought this little 1953-built house in 2000, thinking I would remodel the house in order to take advantage of a beautiful lot. I did some work over eight years, painting a couple of rooms, adding some new flooring, and doing some remodeling that I thought was lovely but was in fact, well, NOT. And time slipped away, as I have a way of finding better things to do than remodel, like foreign travel assignments, riding motorcycles, building a garage BIGGER than my house, rambling blogs, racquetball matches, nights out on the town with friends, or (when things get really desperate) watching episode after episode of Firefly or old Sanford and Son reruns. So now I'm busting my butt on the place. Such is life!