There’s a particular kind of unease that settles in when you grab your deck railing and it moves. Not a little. Actually moves — shifting under your hand like it’s thinking about letting go. I felt that exact feeling one Saturday morning last spring when my 10-year-old leaned against the railing to watch a bird
A few weeks ago I was up on a ladder cleaning out the gutters — something I do every fall without fail — when I noticed three shingles on the south-facing slope of our roof that looked wrong. One was cracked clean through. One had curled up at the corner like a dog-eared page in
Last spring, my 12-year-old nearly put his foot through one of our back deck boards. He was hauling a bag of mulch from the garage, not paying much attention to where he was stepping, and his sneaker punched right through a board that looked fine from a distance but had gone completely soft underneath. No
It started the way a lot of home repair projects start around here — with a kid leaning on something he probably shouldn’t have. My 10-year-old was hanging off one of our front porch posts last spring, and when I went over to redirect that energy toward something more productive, I grabbed the post myself
It started with a basketball. My 12-year-old was working on his three-point shot in the driveway last spring, and somewhere between an airballed attempt and a ricochet off the garage door frame, a side wall panel took a direct hit. The siding didn’t shatter dramatically — it just cracked, buckled slightly, and developed that unmistakable
Every spring in Connecticut, I do a slow walk around the house — checking the foundation, the gutters, the siding — looking for whatever the winter left behind. And every spring, my driveway humbles me a little. Cracks that weren’t there in October. A low spot where water is pooling near the garage door. The
It always seems to happen at the worst possible time. You head downstairs to grab something from the storage shelves and your sock lands in a cold puddle. Or maybe you notice a dark stain creeping up the base of your foundation wall after a heavy spring rain. Either way, that sinking feeling in your
There is a particular kind of satisfaction that comes from standing back and looking at clean, properly flowing gutters on a crisp October afternoon in Connecticut. It is the quiet satisfaction of a job done right — one that most of your neighbors have either ignored or paid someone else to handle. I cleaned mine
Every October, I stand in my driveway and look up at the same problem. The maple trees in our backyard — gorgeous, God-given things in September — have done their job of turning our gutters into a leaf stew. And if you live in Connecticut, you already know what happens if you ignore it: ice
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Tree Removal That Could Have Saved Our Kids’ Bedroom – A Connecticut Dad’s Real-Life Lesson Hey, it’s Steve from CT Home Repair and Tutoring LLC. Last week we finally pulled the trigger on removing an 80-foot oak that had been worrying me for years. It wasn’t just any tree—it was rotting from the inside out,
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