by Alison Moore Smith | Dec 21, 2009 | Design Your Own House, for Home
Don't get technical with me. I'm no tradesman. But I can tell you that the plumber came and ran a whole slew of black pipes all over the ground. They are poking up everywhere. All kinds, for toilets, sinks, showers, floor drains, utilities, appliances. I can't...
by Alison Moore Smith | Dec 18, 2009 | Design Your Own House, for Home
No one likes a wet basement. It renders the rooms uncomfortable and unsanitary, if useable at all. One common feature used to keep basements dry until the surrounding dirt compacts is a French drain. A French drain is a hollow pipe, covered in fabric. The pipe is laid...
by Alison Moore Smith | Dec 16, 2009 | Design Your Own House, for Home
Every house needs to have the street number clearly marked for the sake of visitors and emergency personnel. Rather than using cheap looking numbers from the home store to accomplish this, choose from among the myriad address plaques available for personalization. An...
by Alison Moore Smith | Dec 15, 2009 | Design Your Own House, for Home
The stem walls are poured, moving us one step further to getting the walls going up. What is a stem wall? Stem walls are the supports that are used to join the foundation to the walls. We had planned to use the same concrete block that will comprise the majority of...
by Alison Moore Smith | Dec 15, 2009 | Design Your Own House, for Home
With the temperature hovering in the teens on the building site, it seems on odd time to talk about barbecuing. Most people are hunkered down in front of the fire with a steaming mug of cocoa. But in our house, Christmas is the perfect time to break out the barbecue...
by Guest Author | Dec 14, 2009 | for Good
Forwarded from a senior level person at Chrysler dated July 19, 2009. Monday morning, I attended a breakfast meeting where the guest speaker was David E. Cole, Chairman Center for Automotive Research (CAR ) and a Professor at the University of Michigan. Mr. Cole, who...
by Alison Moore Smith | Dec 13, 2009 | for Love, for Mind
One of my odd recurring nightmares is that someone walks up to me on campus and casually mentions a test in one of my courses—a test I knew nothing about. The panic I felt is familiar to many college students. With my two oldest children attending a university (one...
by Alison Moore Smith | Dec 10, 2009 | Design Your Own House, for Home
You may remember that we were originally planning to include a wood-burning fireplace our custom home. We love the ambience a real fire creates and the fun-factor is high. Over time, however, the logistics (and mess) overcame our sensibilities and we gave in to the...
by Guest Author | Dec 10, 2009 | for Mind, for Spirit
By Monica Moore Smith, age 12 Do you ever think about what celebrity your daughter/son is admiring at the moment? And how they might be overly obsessed with that celebrity, or practically worshipping them? Do they hang a million posters of celebrities all over their...
by Alison Moore Smith | Dec 9, 2009 | Design Your Own House, for Home
In spite of the weather—we had a high of 14 degrees today—the great crew was out working. They reformed and poured the remaining garage footings, this time at the correct height. When we got there, they were covering the cement with vast expanses of plastic and...
