I was browsing houseblogs.net over the weekend. One of the members had a link that caught my eye: LumberJocks is an online woodworkers community. I joined immediately, even though my own shop won’t be done for at least six months. 
Sacramento County will only permit up to 50% of current residential space for unoccupied additions, e.g. garages and shops. Our house was originally 1090 ft2, so the max non-occupiable square footage I would be able to permit was 545 ft2. Barb’s quilt shop was only 480 ft2, so that was the shop we built first. Our addition is 1120 ft2, so once that’s done we’ll have 2210 ft2 which’ll be more than enough for a permit for my shop (768 ft2). But I can’t even apply for a permit for my shop until both the house and Barb’s quilt shop have passed final inspection.
I probably won’t be very active on LumberJocks until our remodel/addition is finished. I may lurk from time to time, but I’ve been way too busy working on the wiring to get involved with anything else.
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.
