Jennifer Saranow at the [Wall Street Journal][wsj] has an [article on home-improvement parties](http://tinyurl.com/2s8t5p). (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][houseblogs]. My general-purpose blog here doesn’t seem to be a perfect fit, but [I’ve joined](http://tinyurl.com/29ulv4) anyway. I’ll have to play with [WordPress][] and see if I can generate a remodel-specific [Atom/RSS feed](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_feed) for the site.
[wsj]: http://online.wsj.com/public/us
[Bug Me Not]: http://www.bugmenot.com/
[Darwin Award]: http://cgi.darwinawards.com/cgi/random.pl
[houseblogs]: http://www.houseblogs.net/
[WordPress]: http://wordpress.org/
We’d love to have a Sonic Chicken remodel feed 🙂 Try asking the question about tailoring a feed in the Houseblogs.net community forum. We have quite a few WordPress users in the community already…
Having talked with Jennifer for this article I could tell while she was fishing/angling for horror stories. I guess talking with me was just too boring, not enough danger/ineptitude/ stupidity on my part (or anyone else’s that helped out) to provide adequate spice to her story. I would like to point out that safety was always a concern and it was nice to have so many people looking out for your health and welfare in a potentially hazardous environment.
I think the article would have benefited from presenting the up side of friends helping with remodels instead of just the predictable string of “tragedies†that occurred from drunken friends with power and mass based demolition tools (sledges).
Over all I’ll just say, if you’re boozing a playing with power tools there’s going to be problems. To quote Jim, “DUH!â€.
Yes, I could tell she was looking for a certain angle on the story too. When we have renovation parties or “demolition derbies” at our house, alcohol is usually reserved for AFTER the work is completed. More in terms of a celebratory, “Holy cow, that was a lot of work. Did we really do all that?” as opposed to “Let’s get wasted and then whip out the sawzall!”
But, it was nice to be mentioned in the WSJ. We plan on wrapping Christmas presents with extra copies of the paper we bought. I only wish they included a link to our blogs so people that were interested could get the real story.
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