Blog de Puree

It was a light day on the closet project. Contractor was here about half a day and framed the two new closets as well as moved the separating wall so that they would both be the same width. Here are some photos of the day’s progress. (The master bedroom closet with the frame for the [...]

Our house has lousy closets. The two that are in the bedrooms are as long as standard closets found in most houses, about five to six feet wide. But the problem is access. They contain a single standard door, such as those found at the entrance to a room, and don’t allow accss to about [...]

I **used** to have a green thumb. I could start stuff from seed and expect bumper crops, but not this year. Every new planting I touch seems to suffer this year. In the long-run, I suppose it can be said I’ve saved all my “growing” powers for other, more important, endeavors this year. That said, [...]

Saying that it was a busy weekend at our house would be an understatement. A more accurate statement would be that it was a tornado of gardening and home improvement. On Saturday, a friend and I removed six yew shrubs from the front yard. It took two men six-and-a-half hours in the rain on Saturday. [...]

The final painting stage of the kitchen/dining/living room color palette strategy is finished. This weekend I painted the living room a light, robin’s egg blue color and we have finally freed ourselves of the builders’ beige tones in the main living areas of our home. I started on Friday evening with prepping the living room [...]

We’ve got a grumpy old oil furnace that heats up the steam radiators throughout our house. The furnace is in decent condition, but it is showing its age because of years of exposure to basement dampness during the spring and fall seasons. The pipes are also old, but they are in great shape. And through [...]

With the help of Randye’s grandparents, we were able to check off another item we had to leave out of the original kitchen plan, architectural accent lighting. For this, we purchased some rope lights at Lowe’s that go above the cabinets. They were easy to install. Rather than screwing in plastic pieces meant to secure [...]

With the foresight of a reknowned fortune-teller, Randye told the contractors to save the kitchen cabinets when they were pulling them out while gutting our old kitchen this past summer. “There has to be some use we can find for them, rather than filling up some landfill,” she told me after I rolled my eyes [...]

Earlier this summer, I blogged about a simple life-hacking technique involving my backpack and traveling by car. I must say, the technique, used by a colleague of mine, went quite well and I was a new convert to life-hacking techniques. In today’s crazy hustle and bustle, any technique I can use to save time and [...]

Tags: life hacking

After the successful redesign of our kitchen, our basement was a complete mess despite the efforts of various contractors cleaning up after themselves. We also had a lot of wood, siding, insulation and other raw materials that were not used, but that we had paid for and opted to keep. I finally agreed to keep [...]