I am sitting on a canvas drop cloth right now with a heat gun in one hand and a metal putty knife in the other. I have been trying to strip three layers of thick white gloss off a single dining room window frame for four hours. My hands are cramped and I can smell century old varnish melting. This is how I spend almost all of my free time.
Buying the Wrong House I bought this place three years ago because I loved the original brick fireplace. The inspector told me the roof was fine. The roof was absolutely not fine. I spent the first year fixing structural water damage instead of picking out tile colors. I learned very quickly that watching a thirty minute renovation show on television gives you zero actual skills for dealing with a rotting floor joist.
Working Room by Room I do almost all the work myself because I cannot afford to pay contractors for every single job. That means everything moves at a glacial pace. I spent an entire month just teaching myself how to patch lath and plaster walls so I would not have to rip them out and hang cheap drywall. I make a lot of expensive mistakes. I have bought the wrong type of primer three separate times.
I write everything down so I do not forget how I solved a problem in one room when I finally get to the next one. You will find very few perfect reveal photos here. You will find a lot of complaining about fine dust and crooked floors.
I am still trying to figure out how to level a base cabinet on a floor that drops two full inches in the center.