Hi! This is a project that has been more than a decade in the making. As you may have guessed from the title of the blog my home is in need of more than a little renovation and I have decided to share what I learn on the journey with anyone who will listen.
Fourteen years ago my wife and I and two young children moved into a nearly 100 year old house (she just passed the century mark this year) (the house, not my lovely wife)with the intention of renovating it into our dream home. About a year earlier I had started a part time job as a music theatre teacher for a local youth company in addition to my full time job as a cabinet maker. In the intervening years we: Bought the theatre company, My Mother died, we had 6 more children, lost 5 of our 6 living Grandparents, closed the theatre and....not much renovation got done.
The daily wear and tear of a family our size has begun to wear the old house out. In May of this year (2010) Oklahoma City suffered a once in a century hail storm that all but destroyed many homes. Like many gifts that come wrapped in strange packages, this one has been the seed money we have needed to complete many of the repairs and improvements we have wanted to do for years. By serving as my own general contractor I have paid myself, rather than someone else, to supervise the roofing and heat and air crews while doing most of the other repairs myself. This blog will be the record of those renovations.
The title does not do the house justice. IF it is crappy it is due to the neglect it has suffered in our busyness over the past decade plus. I will be going through several major projects and describing them in quite a bit of detail, including pictures when I don't forget to shoot them until I am half way done. In the spirit of large artsy families everywhere we will be conducting our experiments on a broken shoe string budget and will do what we can to help you find cheap resources to improve your own Crappy Old House. (thank God for crappy old houses, where else would starving artists with 8 kids live?)
