Every house has its story. What's yours?

It began with a gentle whine, so slight that it required the temporary suspension of respiration and a fractional tilt of the head at just the right angle to be sure I was even hearing it. This was followed by a wide range of puzzled expressions, ranging from game show contestant to village idiot (admittedly not a large leap) as I wandered the house trying to pinpoint it. The refrigerator? No. That whines too, but at a lower frequency. This whine was so high that it was just within the range of my early-middle-aged auditory receptors.    » read more »

After a very long period of start/stop I can finally declare my small upstairs bathroom to be complete. We completely renovated the downstairs of our house last year so we decided to go ahead and replace the pipes to the upstairs bathroom as well (making it non-functional in the process).

Around November of last year I began the process of strengthening/leveling the floor as well as put drywall up on all the existing walls rather than tear them out.    » read more »

Our new house, a large, rambling, u-shaped one-floor dream house (at least for us), neatly tucked away on an island in the Stockholm archipelago, came equipped with an unexpected pleasure (or curse, depending on how you care to look at it): in particular, a swimming pool.    » read more »