The Year of the House: Building a Bar
I’ve been through my fair share of Renovation Trauma. Shortly after I bought my first little two-bedroom, one-bathroom house in 2006, I began to appreciate that owning a home was a never-ending story. There always seemed to be a list of things that needed to be maintained, changed, or fixed. In fact, it was bad enough when I lived alone, back then I only had my own crazy ideas to deal with (and budget for). Then I got married, and instead of one crazy idea-generating brain, we had two! As an aside, no one warns you of this reality before you tie the proverbial knot. Gerhard and I tackled a DIY bathroom renovation at the first home we bought together. The end result was quite spectacular (and I'm happy to report that we managed not to kill each other), but the process was excruciating – at the time it felt as if we lived at the hardware store. We spent an inordinate amount of time buying bags of tile glue, grout, or some weirdly shaped plumbing tool I’d never heard of. We l...