Home Service Plan

This time of year I always like to take a short break from restoration and do a little crafty project for Christmas. It’s by far my favorite holiday of the year and it lends itself to some fun creative ideas that help me think in a different way. Rather than focusing on fixing what is broken I am faced with a blank sheet of paper (or block of wood as it is this year) and have to actually create rather than restore.

This post is sponsored by Minwax who has been encouraging me to try their water-based stains for a

Not every awesome tool needs to cost a lot. Some of my favorite and most useful tools are things that have cost me the least and last the longest. Since I get asked a lot about tools used in the restoration trades I figured sharing some of my favorite, yet inexpensive tools was a must in the holiday shopping season.

I had to list this one first because it has been a total game changer for the work I do. With this handy little tool I no longer need a hammer and nail set because this baby is a spring

America has a mixed history of building quality over its 200+ years. From its colonial roots to the baby-boom years of mass production to the complex engineering of today the style and quality of buildings has changed greatly.

If you’re looking to buy a house, knowing when it was built is just as good a determiner of the building quality as a report from a home inspector. With that in mind I have put together this brief history of building quality so you can better understand where your house may fit into the story.

Building Quality In America

From the

It possible that I have messed up more stain jobs in my career than many people have ever attempted. I count myself as fortunate to have learned my lessons and gotten my Ph.D in D.U.M.B. Now you get to benefit from my mistakes, and if you’re smart you’ll learn and avoid the same wood stain mistakes.

Staining wood is both an art and a science and if you neglect either you will pay for it. I have analyzed the mistakes I’ve made and boiled down them down to five categories which I’m calling the 5 worst wood stain mistakes because

The ingenious invention of the lightning rod was a game changer for historic buildings and allowed us to have the skyscrapers of today without fear of destruction from fire. For centuries, house fires were a major problem across the globe. Hazards like wood burning fireplaces, coal stoves, and ballon framing all contributed to an epidemic of house fires and deaths, but there was always one cause that seemed out of our control…lightning.

That was until 1749 when a Pennsylvania publisher and general tinkerer begin experimenting with electricity in order to understand this strange force better. In 1752 he finalized his

We have a nice solid wood (don’t ask me what type of wood, but it’s hard) coffee table in our living room that my wife and I brought early in our marriage and we both love.

Fast forward 12 years, 3 kids, 2 Great Danes later and our coffee table looks…well, let’s just say it needs some love. A couple corners have been chewed, the finish on the top is chipping and ugly, and even though the wood is solid it looks like a junk store find.

I finally decided I had had enough and it was time to try

Painting metal can be a unique process that is sometimes very similar to wood or drywall and sometimes extremely different. The key to success is knowing the right prep and paint for the right application.

Just like there are a plethora of different paints in the world, there are a ton of different types of metal you may be painting and they all have their unique quirks. Aluminum, steel, galvanized steel, copper, brass, iron, none of them are the same and they all deserve a slightly different treatment.

This post was sponsored by my friends at Krylon. Krylon makes some

There are some very famous old houses that we have grown up on TV, the news, or are famously haunted and I thought that since it’s halloween it might be fun to take a look at those houses and what made them so special. So, for this very special halloween post we’ll be digging into the 6 spookiest old houses in history.

The Munsters House

Though I wasn’t old enough to watch it live I grew up enjoying reruns of The Munsters on Nick at Nite. They were the

I don’t always like doing things like the rest of the world, and so when my wife suggested we get a new doormat I thought, “I can make a doormat!” Thus started my crazy idea to make a wooden doormat for our house.

I honestly had no idea what I was going to build when I proposed this idea, but I knew it had to be something good or my wife would scoff and tell me how much quicker and cheaper we could have gotten something at Hobby Lobby. It was then that I decided it needed to be made