Friends and Family,

Thanks for dropping by to look at the house remodeling project. This site serves two purposes:
1) Keep friends and family up to date
2) Project documentation for my own reference.

As many of you know, friends from Germany lived in my house from August 2018 until June 2019. (I stayed at Linda's house). It was a lot of fun to host them. I wish I could have remodeled the house before they arrived, but I had just retired and was working for a friend for the summer. (Ines requested that I time-stamp each section of the website - great idea! I took a few minutes and did that ... thanks for the suggestion, Ines.)

The linoleum on the kitchen floor was original from 1976 - it was way past time to replace it! Many other areas of the house needed attention as well. Also, we wanted to open up the design a bit, so we replaced a couple of load-bearing walls with posts and beams. The kitchen window stuck out about 2 ft on the exterior, which made accessing the blinds and opening the windows an adventure in climbing on the countertop - literally. This was not a well thought-out design. As you will see, it's gone. It was replaced with a new, flush window (which is easily accessible!). Hat tip to Kevin H. for his help with demolition and Andrew (my son) for his help with both demolition and installation of the new window.

Though I didn't realize it at the time, helping my Dad remodel the house south of Mt. Morris taught me a lot of the skills I need for my remodeling project. For critical stuff and for the areas in which I lack knowledge or experience, Matt Miller (Matt's Home Improvement) is my go-to guy. He helps me with things like setting doors and some windows, teaching me how to replace a load-bearing wall with a beam and posts, and he will install the trim and flooring (and many other things, I'm sure).

Andrew has been a huge help on this project and is always willing help me after he gets home from work and on the weekends. I'm very thankful to have his assistance - I can't compete with a 21 year old's energy, strength, and agility! (Kyle, Andrew's friend, is living at the house, too. He is always willing to lend a hand when needed.)

I've separated the pictures into the sections noted below in an attempt to make the site more user friendly. They are NOT in chronological order, but as noted above, each section shows a timeframe. The sections are in alphabetical order based on the name I assigned to them. DISCLAIMER: I am not a web site expert. The stuff you see here is VERY basic - I hand code it with a text editor. Please report any glitches to me via my email link above.

For remodeling design assistance, I use a free program called Sweet Home 3D. It allows one to layout their ideas, then see it from various external angles and take a virtual walk through. It is easy to use and, for the minimal effort, provides good results.

You techie-types may be interested to know that this is running on a Raspberry Pi ($35 small single board computer). It runs a variant of the Linux OS called "Raspberry Pi OS" (formerly Raspian). I use IrfanView to scale the pictures and generate the thumbnail images and links, then hand-edit the web page as necessary. Hat tip to my good friend Brian for his help in getting me up to speed with IrfanView.

23 December 2020 - I added about 4 months of content and I reorganized the website a bit.

* denotes new content since the last update (July 2020)
(you may need to refresh your browser to see the new content)