Home Guru

It had been a long time between visits with blacksmith Bill Fitzgerald. The last time was almost 30 years ago when I asked him to assemble on my property a number of wrought iron elements– fencing and columns–that I had

Many years ago when my wife and I discovered our dream home in the country, we were delighted that we could figure out a way to turn a one and a half-story saltbox wing with all original 18th century details

At least once or twice a year, I like to take a “snapshot” of the moment in the housing market as a sort of historical record, and the very promising developments in the past six months prompt me to do

Do you sometimes think that needed information comes to you in a strange, synchronistic way, above and beyond objective reasoning? Last week, to observe Halloween with a spooky story, I wrote about a long-kept secret of my family living with

Only after years of writing about homes and what happens in them do I feel confident enough about how readers may regard me to tell a spooky story that I repeatedly placed on the back burner for fear that I would

Isn’t it a great feeling to shampoo your hair and have it be clean and shiny again? You can give your house the same treat. Funny how problems and solutions sometimes come together. I had been noticing some dark vertical

It’s a sure sign that you are getting up there in years when suddenly you find that you’re working with the second generation of family-owned businesses that have provided home maintenance services for many years. It happened with my tree

When he said it, I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. In just a few minutes while meeting with a new customer, he managed to insult my national heritage while identifying himself as a racist

If your house is on sewer, you may think septic systems have no application to you. But as I understand it, as many as one-third of us within the reach of this newspaper are on septic. And if you’re not,

Imagine my surprise last week when I read a real estate piece in The New York Times about the home of my old friend and working associate Bill Houlton, whom I hadn’t seen or heard of in more than 30