I’m already reaping the benefits of houseblogs.net. One of the other families mentioned in the WSJ article referenced the story, so I decided to check their blog — Their tagline is “Humphrey House - Transforming an Arts and Crafts Bungalow into a Green Home for the Future”. (”Arts & Crafts” and “Green Home” are two major cool points right there!)
One of their recent posts is Installing a Loopy Rain Barrel, which looks like an excellent project for our property. Our shop building will have about 1400 ft2 of catchment area, and it’s right next to the garden. (Unfortunately we won’t be able to take advantage of Chicago’s discounted rain barrels.) The downspout diverter is the slickest part of this system, and something that would be an absolute necessity in Sacramento–lots of rain in the winter (when we won’t need it for the garden), so once our barrel is full we’d need some automatic way to dump the excess.
Jennifer Saranow at the Wall Street Journal has an article on home-improvement parties. (The article will only be available for free for a week, but there’s always Bug Me Not if you don’t feel like registering.) Jennifer has been interviewing me, my family, friends and our general contractor for several weeks, since she stumbled across one of my “demolition party” articles. Judging from the title of the article, (”The Three-Martini Renovation”), it looks like the focus was on drinking-and-demolishing — sounds like an excellent way to win a Darwin Award to me, and certainly not something I’d permit my friends and family to engage in. My favorite line from the article:
Don’t open the bar until the work is finished.
To which I’ll add: DUH!
Something cool I learned from the article–there’s a meta site for remodeling-related blogs. My general-purpose blog here doesn’t seem to be a perfect fit, but I’ve joined anyway. I’ll have to play with WordPress and see if I can generate a remodel-specific Atom/RSS feed for the site.
