The summer issue of Richmond Magazine’s R•Home has a nice article on a southside ranch home-improvement blog. The article suggests a few other related sites, including our humble production, Bill Chapman’s Enon Hall, the house blogging central that is houseblogs.net, and our friends over in Jackson Ward.

We put in a handrail at the front steps because the city said that we had to. It took us 2 tries to get it right.

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The former boarding house/whore house across the street has been restored and is for sale. For only $193,000, you’d get a house AND some good stories to tell…

School is still has 2 more weeks to run before we can really switch gears into getting back on the house. This will be the summer that great strides are made towards finally finishing repairing the siding and painting the house, picking up where we left off 22 freakin’ months ago…

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I’ve recently put up on local community blogs 2 posts (with photos!) that might be of interests to old house folks: 801 North 24th coming back to life, about the incipient restoration of an 1855 brick home in the Union Hill neighborhood of Richmond, Virginia; and Cast and Wrought, a look at cast&wrought iron architectural metalwork in some of our older neighborhoods.

The city sent us a letter last week informing us that the condition of our house does not meet code and that we have 30 days to fix the problems or face fines (we are not alone in this).

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After 4 1/2 years in the house, we finally got the will together to bust up into the attic last week.

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A photographic cross section of the neighborhood: the 1206 of every block from 38th Street to 19th Street.

This is what it would be like, sort of…

The 2008 real estate assessments are out now and for the first time in at least 10 years the assessed value of our house did not rise. This is to be expected, I guess, given everything going on in the housing market but it does take a little of the glow off of having finally gotten the work done for the tax abatement program.

Every time that I have to deal with a professional plumber or electrician I’m either left feeling ripped off or infuriated by their incompetence.

Our neighborhood blog has an ongoing series of before&after photos of renovations from around the area, if you’re into that kind of thing…

The wreath seemed really big when it was inside.

We awoke Saturday morning to the scampering of a squirrel on the ceiling of the bedroom. The brave squirrel had discovered the gap where the wood has rotted behind one of the corbels across the front of the house, and had found a way to hang upside and then scoot into the attic space.

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We moved in to our house 4 years ago today. We were pretty sure at that time that we’d be done in a year or 2; we still haven’t been in the attic yet…