Welcome to our old house...the blog AND the house. We have been in this house for about 14 years now, and it was old when we bought it. Since the day we moved in, the house has been "under renovation".
Well, now the mortgage is paid (yaaaay!) and it's (finally) time to really get busy on this old place! And that's what this blog is about. Just a way to chronicle the changes at 173!
Thanks for stopping by and feel free to stop by now and again!
___________________________________
2026 Update: Looking back at this very first post, I can't help but smile a little. At the time, I thought I was simply starting a place to document renovations around an old house. I imagined mostly before-and-after pictures, a few notes about paint colors and lumber, and perhaps a record of projects so I'd remember how I had done them.
House 173 had other ideas.
Over the years, this little blog slowly grew into something much more than a renovation journal. The projects are still here, of course. You'll find porch remodels, fences, workshop improvements, wallpaper, woodworking, plumbing repairs, electrical projects, and more than a few "quick jobs" that somehow turned into week-long adventures. But somewhere along the way, I realized that the projects themselves were only half the story.
The old tools hanging in my workshop each seemed to have a history worth preserving. Many belonged to my father, others came from flea markets, rummage sales, estate sales, or forgotten corners of old toolboxes. Restoring them became less about making rusty steel shiny again and more about honoring the generations of working people who relied on them long before they reached my bench.
The yard quietly became another story altogether. What began as a fairly plain city lot gradually filled with trees, gardens, birds, and places to sit and simply enjoy the seasons. The Macintosh apple tree, the lilacs, the Leopold bench, the sparrows nesting in the carport, even old Cyd the gargoyle—all of them somehow earned their own chapters.
Then there are the memories.
The farther I moved through restoring the house, the more I found myself restoring pieces of my own past. Childhood baseball games. Learning to work beside my father. Old neighborhoods. Dogs we've loved. Family traditions. The places, people, and ordinary moments that shaped who I became somehow found their way into these pages. It turns out an old house has a remarkable way of reminding you where you've been.
One lesson has become clearer with every passing year: no house is ever truly finished. There will always be another loose board, another room to paint, another vintage tool to rescue, another tree to plant, another story waiting to be told. I've stopped thinking of House 173 as a project with an ending. It's simply where life happens.
If you're visiting for the first time, welcome. I hope you'll wander around a while. Whether you came looking for woodworking ideas, old-house projects, vintage tool restorations, gardening inspiration, or simply stories about making a home one weekend at a time, I hope you'll find something here worth your time.
And if you've been following along for years, thank you. I never imagined this little corner of the internet would become such an important part of my life. I'm grateful you've chosen to spend some of your time here.
There's still plenty left to build, repair, restore, plant, and remember.
So come on in.
The coffee's probably hot, the workshop's probably a mess, and there's almost certainly another project waiting just around the corner.