I’ve been talking about getting a “fixer-upper” house for a while, mostly just as a project, but somewhat to see if my brother and I have what it takes to do the Real-Estate thing. So far, nothing, but we’re taking baby steps. We added some lattice-work behind my deck, so dogs couldn’t jump the fence, and we’re working on adding a wall and a door in the basement to separate the crawl space from the basement room. Angela is even planning on redecorating the kitchen; painting it and doing something with the floors. All fun projects which, all-told will take us a good three or four weekends if things go well. Let’s call it 100 “people-hours”.

I measure it that way, because I recently came across these two articles: The first, about building A Four Bedroom House in Three Hours, 44 Minutes & 59 Seconds by some Habitat for Humanity people. I was impressed, but looking at the details, the group did tons of up-front planning, and apparently lots of prefab work off site. An excellent accomplishment, no question, but was it cheating? How long did it REALLY take?

I probably wouldn’t have even thought about it except, serendipitously, I came across this article a couple of days later, about an Amish house that was rebuilt in 15 hours after a tornado destroyed it. That’s with practically NO planning, and no pre-fab (and, I suspect, a great shortage of power-tools and such). It’s not apples-to-apples, but I can’t help but feel that the nice people who set the world record were really outclassed in the end, by good old-fashioned skill. I don’t know what to do with this comparison, but I’m sure there’s a lesson to be learned.

Sorry the site’s been down. I use a local ISP for my webhosting (on a DSL line to my house): “IgLou”, if you were curious. Normally this is immaterial, but they recently decided to upgrade my service (AND charge me less — double win, no doubt). The problem was that this required a modem upgrade, which meant that I had to carefully plan picking up the modem and being in town when the service switched so that the website was down as little as possible. Since the website’s been up and down for the past couple of weeks, you can imagine how successful that was.

Anyway, we’re back up now — full speed (although BellSouth thinks there may be some line noise for some reason). If you notice any problems, just let me know!