I bought a crappy old house built in the 1920s a few years into my marriage. There were so many things wrong with it. Water intrusion, leaking pipes, roots in the sewer line… on and on. But it was our house, and we loved it. One issue was that the water heater was tiny, and […]

I've heard the phrase, “It's too cold to set the charge!” for as long as I've been in the trade. I've also heard some variations of, “We need to come back and set the charge,” or, “We need to come back to do XYZ [some other thing].” Granted, there are cases where you do actually […]

There's a moral to this story, though it is a bit more of a cautionary tale than most I write. While it doesn't rank with the story of three wise men or even Frank Capra's Christmas classic “It's a Wonderful Life,” you may find some common threads with both learning wisdom and remembering why throwing […]