I caught a crazy-cat-lady type from somewhere in the neighborhood digging up all my pavestones the other night. It was her second visit.
The night before I had heard some hollow thumping just outside the master bedroom. I guessed someone was tinkering with their car, or maybe cleaning it out, but the next morning [...]

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The plans, before I hurt my head and before I realized the house leaked every time it rained hard, were that we were going to landscape the grass and path adjacent to our house. Winter led to spring, spring led to summer, and I have packets of seeds on my dresser wondering what they’re doing [...]

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This afternoon C&D didn’t want to sleep right after lunch. While they put my shoes on and told each other dirty jokes (”Trash truck! Ha ha!”) downstairs, trying very hard to persuade each other that we weren’t the slightest sleepy, I wiped up from lunch upstairs. As I walked into the kitchen, I watched a [...]

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May 2:The weather was pretty and it was the first weekend in days not spent supervising or even discussing siding, wood rot, paint, and foundations. We needed out of the house, and in a hurry. Since C&D are enjoying this year’s flowers, we made a quick visit to the Houston Garden Center. We touched and [...]

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House, I decided your color is a color that we mixed at Home Depot the night before, with the help of our favorite employee at the paint department. You can see the results of our experimenting. Nine colors (one is a combination of two other colors, neither of which were of course remotely right), three [...]

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The house. Within a month of moving in we replaced the front doors, installed FLOR, created two new living spaces, painted the interior, fixed up the shelves and scrubbed, scrubbed, scrubbed. In December we replaced the toilets. The flanges were not installed correctly, so we installed the toilets on platforms that I shaped with a [...]

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I would call it, “wood rots.”

Decades of negligence, a cover-up with a lot of caulk and paint, and then more neglect has resulted in a heck of a spring. The more siding we pull off, the more wood rot we find.

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