Given our still-fresh-out-of-college budget, most of the properties we found needed work – a lot of work. I don’t think a single house we looked at was staged to sell and many of them were, well, pretty boring. We prioritized our hunt by location, price, and personality. After a lot of online searching and 2 trips to SC, we found our first home. It was a 1970s contemporary fixer-upper with a ton of personality. We spent just over 5 years in the house and in that time we made some major transformations. Just check out some of the before and after shots below:

In April, Amy and I relocated again from Columbia, SC to Atlanta, GA for my job. We weren’t all that excited about selling our first home at the bottom of the housing market but we priced it low and put it out there. Thanks to the blood, sweat and tears we invested in all of our DIY renovation projects, we got it sold in just over 2 months. We figured we’d buy here once we sold our place in SC, but after weeks of searching we decided that Atlanta’s record low home prices were still just too high for us to buy. This was especially true if we wanted to be in a safe neighborhood with good schools and find a house with as much character and potential as our place in Columbia. Instead we committed ourselves for over a month to finding a long-term rental option.

Love at First Click

A couple weeks ago though, something crazy happened. Amidst a busy weekend of scouring padmapper and scheduling rental viewings, Amy checked the real estate listings again and found a funky 1980s contemporary fixer-upper that was priced to sell. It needs work – a lot of work, but we immediately fell in love. The place is on a quiet street in Decatur, a small town inside the Atlanta perimeter that has one of the best school districts in the state. Location, price and personality – check, check and check. We made an offer, then a few counters, reached a deal, scheduled inspections and arranged financing. We don’t close until the end of the month, but everything is locked in at this point so we figured we’d go ahead and introduce everyone to our next crazy project house:

Right now you probably think we’re a little bit insane. Honestly, we feel that way ourselves but in a few years, I guarantee this place will look completely different. Hopefully for the better.

The one flaw of our house that we hadn’t remedied was the landscaping. We did what we could by removing unwanted trees, digging up rotten railroad ties and transplanting the sporadically planted Azalea bushes into defined planter areas. A couple weekends ago we also had 22 tons of fill dirt dumped in front of our house and rented a skid-steer and a harley rake attachment to level out our lumpy, terraced property. One thing remained the same though; it still wasn’t a “yard”.

That finally changed last weekend when we rolled out 8,000 square feet (16 pallets) of Centipede grass. Of all the projects we’ve done here, laying that much sod was by far the most physically exhausting. Between running the tiller, raking the soil, moving loads of sod, laying out the rolls, cutting the edge pieces with a machette and pushing a 250lb water-filled roller over it when we were done, there were no easy tasks associated with this project. If it weren’t for our friends Levi, Greg and Jay who helped us do the bulk of the work on Saturday, we would have never finished. In fact, I just finished rolling out the last piece of sod while wearing a headlamp at 8pm tonight.

As has been the case with several of our DIY projects, we didn’t know exactly what we were getting ourselves into. Our plans hit a few snags: the rain last week washed away all the soil we loosened over the prior weekend, we over-estimated a little on the amount of sod we needed and under-estimated how much time it would take. The results though, are amazing. We now have a beautiful, intentional-looking yard that perfectly compliments our house.

View more pictures of our newly sodded yard.

You can click on the links below to see a 1024×768 version.

Current Color – Blech…

Scheme 1

Scheme 2

Scheme 3

Scheme 4

Help us out! Just let us know in the comments which color scheme you like the best and why. Thanks!

Amidst all that work though, I learned a lot and gained quite a bit of inspiration from the process. The most interesting part to me was the planning phase. While most people you see on those DIY shows tell you to just choose a starting point and work out, using spacers to maintain the grout joints, my father-in-law explained how real tile layers don’t use spacers. Instead, they rely on a meticulously planned grid that is laid out with chalk lines and adjusted to prevent (as much as possible) having to use small filler pieces where the tile meets the walls. While we could have just picked a place and started laying tile, the grid method allowed us to make cuts in one location while someone else was actually laying the tile. For more pictures from the process, check out our photo gallery.

With all these home improvement projects going on and the prep work leading up to the tile project, it’s hard to keep up with all the other things that are going on. Somehow though, in the last 3 weeks I posted an article to WPDFD, spoke to some prospective web designers at the Atlanta Art Institute, was interviewed for Smashing Magazine’s 50 Designers x 6 Questions and my book sold out again. Ames is busy as well, pulling together her research proposal for the next 3 years of the PhD program. Labor days, indeed.

Since then, our non-work life has been a whirlwind of cam locks, hinges, and drawer pulls. As of last night though, we’re finished with the majority of the assembly, have removed all the old cabinet doors and it’s time to start packing everything in boxes. Once that’s all done, it’s popcorn scraping, sawzall cutting, sledgehammer demolition time. As you may have guessed, this is the part of the project that I’ve been anticipating the most and I’d like to get started this weekend if possible. My wife (and super project coordinator) pointed out though that as soon as it’s all gone, we’ll be without a real kitchen until all work is finished; so we may end up delaying the sledgehammer slinging until the following weekend. Either way, it’s going to be beautiful when it’s all done.

In other news, The Principles of Beautiful Web Design still seems to be selling well even after its place at the top of the Sitepoint books page has been taken by The Art and Science of CSS. Although I’ve really been looking forward to this book I still haven’t bought my copy, but I’ll have to wait as it seems the first print run has already sold out! Congrats to Cameron, Jina, David, Steve, and Jonathan!

And last by not least, I’ll be speaking at this year’s Webmaster Jam Session on September 21 & 22 at the Adam’s Mark in Dallas, Texas. From what I heard about last year’s event, I am both excited and humbled to be a part of this year’s Jam Session. I also can’t believe the list of confirmed speakers that I’ll get to meet up with. Some of these folks have been an inspiration to me for a long time, and I’ve only had the pleasure of meeting a handful of them in person so far. Should be a whole ton of fun.

Before:

Previously, I had the cable modem (top left) conntected to the uplink port on the Vonage router. I then used 3 of the 4 wired ports to connect the iMac, the PC, and the Printer/All-in-one. The 4th port was connected to the wall jack that I installed which runs under the house to the living room where it connects to our wireless router. The wireless router is connected to “The Box” (our little server/media center which is connected to the TV) and provides wireless access to Amy’s laptop.

I set this up before we picked up Amy’s laptop and the wireless router. It worked great at the time because The Box was in the same workgroup as the rest of the computers even though it was out in the living room. After we added the wireless router, getting into the box from the computers in the office became a major pain. I tried disabling DHCP on the router and setting The Box in the DMZ, but I still couldn’t get file and print sharing to work from the computers in the office.

After:

By moving the wireless router into the office and connecting everything to the network through it (rather than the vonage router) file and print sharing is now so much smoother. We’ve had a wireless PCI adapter in the PC for a while, and since it’s now on the opposite side of the office, we decided to utilize that rather than running a long cat5 around the room.

New Furniture Layout:

Amy used Better Homes and Gardens’ Arrange-a-Room tool to create the new furniture layout. No, we don’t have pink office chairs, a blue futon, or white “server-room” tile in the office, but the little online tool saved us a lot of time.

So yea, even with the pretty Omni Graffle charts, and Amy’s furniture layout this is still quite possibly the most boring thing I’ve ever posted here. I don’t expect anybody to read this far into it or even find it useful. It’s really for posterity that I’m writing about our home network. You see, in a few months this network configuration will probably all change. In a few years I won’t even remember how I had things setup, and at some point I won’t even remember which computers we had when. I hope at that point that we will at least have flying cars or teleportation. Perhaps we’ll even have salmon flavored soda, USB beverage chillers or disappearing colored bubbles.

You can click on the picture for Amy’s post (and more pictures), or just hover over it to see what they look like in the light. Amy found a pattern for her Shrek Pumpkin online at CarvingPumpkins.com. I decided I wanted to do a Gators pumpkin, but couldn’t find a pattern anywhere, so I made my own using a wallpaper I found online. I had to work with it a bit in Photoshop to get a black and white pattern to go by, so if there’s any Gator fans out there wondering how to make one of these:

1. Download this image.
2. Print it out as big as you can.
3. Clean out your pumpkin and tape the pattern on where you want it.
4. Poke holes around all the black areas.
5. Remove the paper pattern.
6. Cut along the dotted lines with a pumpkin carving saw.

I probably make it sound too easy. It took us both about 3 hours to get our pumpkins carved, but neither of us have done intricate pumpkin carving before…so I’m sure it might take some people less…but it’s really not that hard.

1. Trees, or more accurately stumps. We have been trying to get a maintainable handle on the forrest that is our yard. As a result, we’ve got quite a few stumps around. They range in diameter from about 2 to over 18 inches. Today’s stump was a small one, but then there’s factor 2.
2. Hard Soil. Back in Florida, the ground was nice and moist. You could actually use a shovel to dig into the ground. Not so here. In addition to shovels, you need a tool called a Mattock that has a pick or axe on one side, and a grub hoe on the other.

Getting this one tiny tree stump out of the ground probably took us a couple hours. We started out thinking we could just dig it up, then moved to hacking at roots with the mattock, then more digging, then I got out the chainsaw…which started smoking, so we went back to digging and hacking again. Here, Ames is clearing out some of the dirt around the roots by hand so I might split them in twain.

Success!!! – Little did we know, we were far from “done” with this project.

Once we got the stump out we had to bring in some soil from another part of the yard to even out the slope from the house. The goal of all this digging and dirt moving: plant Hydrangeas. We finished leveling out the soil, made our holes, put down some potting soil and got the new plants watered in. They’re looking a little scraggly now, but with some TLC they’ll make it through the winter and create an amazing display in the Spring.

Last Saturday while Amy’s dad and I were out in the yard chopping up one of our dead trees, I slipped on a nice round log and landed on the side of my face on another log. In my head it went something like Ryan’s stunt from Singing in the Rain, but it was far less graceful, I didn’t really do a flip, and I don’t think Ryan could land on the side of his face if he tried.

Having wrestled for 3 years in high school, my ears were already a little deformed, and I fully expected when it happened that I had broken cartilage. Fortunately though, a week later, my ear seems to have mostly healed up. Ames and I spent most of this weekend doing more of the same type of work. Between this week and last, I think we’ve cut down about 14 trees. Some were large, some were small, some were dead…and some were tall. Sorry, couldn’t help it. It’s not like we have a shortage either. Amy tried to figure out how many we had total and lost count at 40. I think our goal is to get that number down to about half. We really don’t hate trees, we just like the idea of being able to grow grass in our yard…and of course, I like using a chainsaw. Perhaps I should stop this post now before I start getting hate mail from the folks at treesaregood.com. While I’m at it…maybe I should sign up for health insurance too.

Looking back, I’ve been posting a lot more about house stuff and very little about webdesign or development. So…as a side note, I just wanted to say I’m very excited and inspired by the ALA Redesign. In case you haven’t checked it out yet, the new design is by Jason Santa Maria, css is by Eric Meyer, and the backend is built on rails by Dan Benjamin. How crazy is that? There’s even a few custom promo shirts, including this XHTML fist one on the right by Kevin Cornell. I think I have to buy it.