Beach House in the Burbs

When we finally put our hardwood floors down, after 7 years of living with just the subflooring (which looked great after 7 years since we had passed out magic markers to all who visited--and we had way more people who were willing to visit us than you'd think given our flooring situation--and let them go to town on the subflooring) in the living room, dining room, kitchen and hall, Chris covered up one of the air return vents in the living room. He always meant to uncover it again, but when you have completion issues--fortunately, only at our house, not at his clients' houses--things don't always get done in a timely manner. After our hallway and guest bedrooms (one had been used to store everything from the living room, dining room and kitchen that would fit in there while the hardwood floors were going down and essentially remained storage for nearly 2 years while we slowly put everything back in the right place) including all contents mildewed (again, reminding us of th...

Pa. farm discovers a 4-legged chicken You might be wondering what a four-legged chicken found in Pennsylvania has to do with a home remodel in the suburbs of Atlanta, but bear with me. Many years ago we found a clutch of eggs in our backyard on Halloween night. The mother chicken had disappeared, the eggs were beginning to hatch--that's how we found them, the baby chicks were peeping--and it was very cold that night. Chris happened to have an incubator--really, he has one of everything there ever was. If they still did the gameshow Let's Make a Deal, he'd be able to pull out of his pocket anything Monty Hall asked for. But I digress. He loaded the eggs/chicks into the incubator, brought them in the house (yes, you read that correctly) and suddenly we were raising chickens. One day the chicks went from really cute to very gross--they just poop everywhere--and it was time to get them out of the house. But they were still to young to live outside. So Chris moved them into the ...

Okay, no, I don't really live at the beach. But it's a dream. Meanwhile, my remodeling-contractor husband Chris and I are renovating a ranch house in the suburbs of Atlanta in our own beachy style--sand-colored hardwood floors, mint-green walls, lots of light. It's been a long, long process. Twelve years ago we plunked down every penny we had on 2 acres, a pool and a big pile of potential that could only loosely be called a house. Mostly we called it the cave--brown trim, brown-gold carpet (with a heavy overlay of dirt!), and this dark room that we generously named the box room. It had been a garage in a former life. Whoever changed it into indoor space had worked way beyond their potential. You'd think (it's okay, everybody else does, too) with my very own remodeling contractor in the house things would go smoothly and quickly around here. But, in fact, just the opposite is true. Following a grueling day of working on other people's houses, Chris isn't rea...