It seemed like it should be pretty simple to select colors for inside my house. Compared to the other decisions we had made so far in our remodel – like agonizing over the nuances of our kitchen cabinets – it would be easy to select some hues from a Kelly Moore fan deck. Then reality happened. I was using our kitchen remodel as a reason for doing a long overdue color makeover of our major rooms. Some extra accent lighting would be added, but it was mostly about new colors everywhere. The bedrooms and baths would be spared [...]

Long before my current kitchen remodel, there was the Great Family Room Addition of ’98 in which my wife and I and our two small children passed the rainy season with the back corner of our house missing its walls and roof. Instead of risking our hardwood floor, we chose to stop work on our do-it-yourself addition for the winter and hunker down against the cold rains by covering the back of the house with a massive sheet of clear plastic sloped toward the backyard. We chose clear plastic because this was our Family Room and it would [...]

There are ways we can make our homes ready for us to “age in place” and still look like a gorgeous house. “Aging in place” is the name given to people remaining comfortably in their homes even as their bodies weaken with age. Many of these accommodating aspects can be built-in and seem so “normal” as to be invisible. It can start with a simple idea, like laying out a two story house so that there is both an upstairs and a downstairs Master Bedroom. The downstairs version is usually the “minor” master, but should at least meet the standards [...]

It seems everybody has heard that the rules for fireplaces have changed. They have. The new regs go something like this: If you already have a wood burning fireplace you will get to keep using it, except on “spare the air days” as declared by the Bay Area Air Quality Management Board. Benicia gets its mandates for fireplace rules from this agency. For new construction you can still install wood burning devices (it’s true, at least for now) but they will have to be environmentally friendly “EPA certified” models. These EPA models can be decked out with all the trappings [...]