This Damned Old House

September 10, 2006 4:58 PM

Houseblogs.net is an aggregator of home renovations blogs, created by our own Jeanmari and hubby DIYer. The 340 member blogs range from This Old Crack House to a couple converting a missile silo. Featured stories include the people who found a secret room in their house, and a community section has more good home renovation advice than you could shake a wrecking bar at. A nice place for inspiration and commiseration for owners of older homes.
posted by LarryC (14 comments total)

fucking awesome post.
posted by mathowie at 5:05 PM on September 10, 2006

I have secret room dreams often and wake up excited, thinking for a moment that this small Brooklyn apartment has space I never noticed. It's not here of course.
Every now and then I would love to be out of the city knocking a house around. I'd probably have Mr. Blandings type experience without being Cary Grant, though.
posted by kingfisher, his musclebound cat at 5:39 PM on September 10, 2006

Cool site. Mrs. Octo and I spent all day walking around a house tour of restored and semi-restored victorian townhouses and have ourselves half convinced to buy one. I (semi) restored a 1905 foursquare many years ago but that was before I had internet access and long before blogs. Access to a community like this would have helped me out a lot.
posted by octothorpe at 6:07 PM on September 10, 2006

Great post, thanks !
posted by lobstah at 6:18 PM on September 10, 2006

These blogs are so addictive and dangerous for those of us in the grip of home improvement mania. I look at this post and think, yeah, I should cut a big hole in my roof next weekend and build a dormer! Then I come across this site and think Dayton isn't that far. I would kill for this front door.
posted by LarryC at 6:18 PM on September 10, 2006

Hey, nice resource. Thanks for the post!
posted by flapjax at midnite at 6:18 PM on September 10, 2006

Excellent - thanks!
posted by madamjujujive at 6:22 PM on September 10, 2006

Here is an older metafilter thread about houseblogging. How things have grown since then... (I've got one of those houseblogs, too)
posted by john m at 6:29 PM on September 10, 2006

Great FPP. Thanks!
posted by dobbs at 6:54 PM on September 10, 2006

It's not a blog, but my husband's got a website dedicated to all the remodeling he's done to our 1920's house..
posted by Lucinda at 7:58 PM on September 10, 2006

Great post, LarryC. I'm getting hooked on "This Old Crack House" -- how do people manage these hellish processes and retain a sense of humor? I'll never understand it, but I love to read about it. (Aside to Jeanmari -- I truly adore the typeface on your banner. Care to say what it is?)
posted by melissa may at 9:24 PM on September 10, 2006

I looked at the missile silo renovation site, and immediately thought "whoa, this is really screwed up in Firefox, better open it in IE".

Oh.

Well, fair enough, I suppose. They've got to renovate a silo. All I've got to do is deal with a site apparently painted by Piet Mondrian.

(Every page they have actually seems to be linked from the front page, though this is not immediately obvious. There's not actually anything before "week 23" that I can find.)
posted by dansdata at 2:00 AM on September 11, 2006

Wierd... I don't even own a home yet I was looking at a couple of houseblogs yesterday. My all-time favorite is Our Victorian House. The level of detail and DIY-ness is ab-so-lu-tly incredible. Astounding, even.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 4:05 AM on September 11, 2006

Wow. Everyone is too kind. But really, the cool content comes from our members who are a really great bunch (hi, john m :)

We'd love some feedback on some of the Beta elements of the site because we are still working on usability and the interface. (My husband and I work on this at night during the week after the kid goes to bed.)

For example, when you go into the community section of the site, you can browse Profiles and you can search profiles/posts (as in "kitchen" or "I am going to kill the plumber"). If a reader subscribes, they can add profiles of sites they like to a "Friends" list, which then gives you a view in the Blogs tab of just your friends' recent blog entries. Stuff like that. (We do not sell subscriber info, btw.) There is a lot in there, so if you see any bugs or have any feedback, please let us know!

If you have a houseblog (even if it isn't officially a blog), please feel free to join! You will still get access to the houseblogs only sections of the discussion boards, etc.

We hope that this site will help others to feel more confident about home improvement DIY, especially women and first-time DIYers--whether you have an apartment, a condo, a house or, yes, a missile silo.

p.s. The font for the houseblogs.net banner is called Brandywine. Glad you like it!

p.s.s. We had started a thread about favorite houseblogs posts. That is a good place to start getting into the content if you're feeling overwhelmed.
posted by jeanmari at 6:01 AM on September 11, 2006