home renovation

When Sump Pumps Attack

We interrupt this regularly scheduled post on Hawaii for an emergency bulletin. The day after we came back from Hawaii, the alarm on the sump pump started going off in the basement. This isn’t terribly shocking. The thing is tempermental at best. So I silenced it, and then silenced it again when it went off an hour later. I checked the power breaker to see if maybe something had switched off, and it did seem that something might have. So I made sure all was as it should be, and thought no more of it. Until it went off again

Extreme Cold in Maine

Over the weekend, it got pretty darn chilly here in Maine. How chilly? On Friday night, the temperature dropped to 21 below 0F, with a windchill of 50 below. The high never got above 0 during the day, and the wind was vicious the whole time. I love me some winter, but I can pass on the temps that cold. This was the first bout of really cold weather we’ve dealt with since the kitchen renovation. Back before we renovated, we knew where there were potential trouble spots, and we would take measures to avoid frozen pipes there. (“Measures” really

Places You Don’t Want to Hear Water

I was excited for Friday last week, as I had the day off work, and I was looking forward to getting closer to having the house all ready to go for Thanksgiving. I got up and got some chores out of the way, and I was just getting ready to get down to some cleaning when I heard it. Trickling. Not just trickling, really. More of a “constant flow of water falling.” That’s a beautiful noise out in nature. Calm. Peaceful. But in your house, where you don’t have any water features installed? It’s not exactly a noise that brings

The Bathroom Begins!

And here we are. September and another home renovation project. This time, we’re working on the downstairs bathroom. (The only bathroom we had, back in the day.) As we’ve renovated the rest of the house, bit by bit rooms that were just fine have become rooms that need renovation to keep up with the upgrades we’ve been making elsewhere. (Which makes sense. Those rooms are now at least 15 years old, if they were renovated right before we moved in.) Up until now, the downstairs bathroom has been more and more neglected, to the point that none of the kids

Once More into the Decluttering Fray

When it came time for our kitchen renovation to begin, we had a number of items in the current kitchen that needed to be rehoused while the construction happened. And in true Bryce fashion, I handled that by . . . throwing all of those items into the family room next door. They remained there throughout the long reconstruction process, but when that was all over, I put them right back where they belonged, because I’m awesome. Ha. No. I left them there, untouched, because I had lots of other things to do. And they’ve stayed there and stayed there