All Articles

Is Your Home Remodeling Contractor a Home Remodeling Contractor?

    I know noone really wants to hear about it one more time in their day but here goes: the economy is down.  Construction is way down.  New home construction is abysmal.  Where did all those home builders and specialty contractors go you ask?  They’re out trying to get remodeling work.      New construction and [...]

Read the full article →

Hot Kitchen? or Not?

This article is reproduced with permission from the author: friend and colleague Paul Lesieur of Silvertree Construction, a kitchen and bath remodeler in the Twin Cities. When considering to makeover your Twin Cities kitchen did you know that many prize winning designs were done at the low and mid-level price range? Its like cooking, its not the [...]

Read the full article →

HUD 203(k) Loans

     The Federal Housing Administration (FHA), which is part of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), administers various single family mortgage insurance programs. The Section 203(k) program is the Department’s primary program for the rehabilitation and repair of single family properties.   With the 203k program you originate one mortgage which finances [...]

Read the full article →

Pennsylvania Passes Legislation Regulating Contractors

  The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania recently passed legislation to regulate the home improvement industry.  In addition to many other measures the bill establishes a requirement that all contractors obtain a registration number from the State to perform contracting work in PA.  I’ll discuss some of the important aspects of this bill.   There is a provisioin requiring [...]

Read the full article →

How to Absolutely Screw Up Your Remodel

Remodeling always presents challenges, the ones that come up most are budget constraints, incomplete plans, a skill set not up to the task. Let’s look at these concerns and learn a few things.

Read the full article →

Cooking Great Food Starts with Great Kitchen Design

If you want to understand how food cooks, cook eggs. Several thousand. It really starts to make sense, however, the real key to flavor, the key to understanding savory foods, comes down to one thing: caramelization.

Read the full article →

Custom Tile Showers, What’s the Skinny?

Updated July, 2010 What do they cost? As with most things not made in Asia, more than you thought they would.   A properly constructed shower requires a lot of time to build.  As we all know, time is money, and a craftsman worth his salt knows what his time is worth.   Due to the endless [...]

Read the full article →

Thinking Green

On a crisply frozen January evening I arrived at my home after a long day of building to be informed by my better half that my neighbor, who was tending to her dying father at the hospital, had an oil furnace that wouldn’t fire up. Grumbling under my breath I trudged through the snow to her house.  After trying [...]

Read the full article →

Putting the "Custom" in Custom Tile

I bought my better half a toilet for Christmas. I know, that doesn’t sound like a particularly good idea in general and, as it turned out, it wasn’t.  She did, however, very much want the toilet replaced.  Of course when it came time to install the new toilet I couln’t reconcile myself to the idea [...]

Read the full article →

Determining a Kitchen Remodeling Budget

It is very important to determine a budget for any home improvement project, and kitchen remodeling is no exception. A word of caution: I spent several hours researching kitchen remodeling cost and budgeting on the internet to gather data for this article.  I ran into a couple websites that gave square footage pricing for kitchen remodeling.  [...]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →