In 2000, Jill and I took over a large, Baltimore Victorian town house that was a trashed fraternity. A few years later, after lead poisoning and other mishaps, we married in the house. In 2008 our rehabbing efforts were featured in THIS OLD HOUSE magazine. We're still working on it at http://houselove.org.
My girlfriend Jill and I first saw the big brick Victorian row house in December 1999. It was in an old Baltimore neighborhood and had sat abandoned for nearly a year. It was such a wreck that most prospective buyers walked in, took one look, then promptly walked out. The place had been owned by a notorious fraternity for one riotous decade. We didn’t know this at the time. You couldn’t tell from the outside how bad the inside was. Three stories tall, made of pumpkin-colored brick, with three bays on every floor and a witch’s-cap tower at its foremost corner, the house was the jewel of the block—or had been. It seemed the kind of place that might have grand rooms, secret passageways, ghosts. more here:
Recent posts
In Birmingham, AL, yesterday I ate two pit-cooked pork barbecue sandwiches from Carlilse’s and nearly passed out from the goodness. If you’ve never had Southern BBQ, you are missing something special. Right now, I’m curbside at a city park in Tuscaloosa. Cleo is sprawled in the grass and I’m trying to keep up with the logistics of booking this 66-city book tour, which means I am on the phone every day and emailing every day in an attempt to fill in the gaps, tie up loose ends, etc. All of this complicates life on the road. I haven’t had time even to send out an email blast to let people know I’m out here. That’s not the way to work a tour. To do it right, you need a staff of three...
read more at Houselove Posted 1 day 2 hours ago.
I could have used another week to get ready for my 66-city book tour in my custom camper van. But, most likely, I would have said this no matter how much time I’d had to prepare. As it was, I got on the road after only a few hours’ sleep. Packing everything I might need for a month — into the tiny nooks and cabinets of my camper van — took longer than I had expected, even though I had started packing three days before taking off. This first leg lasts one month and takes me down to New Orleans and back. Cleo, our basset hound, is with me. She’s such a good sport, always wagging her tail, always ready to hop out and explore. Right now she’s curled up on her bed just outside the van — on the asphalt. We’re parked in a Walmart lot and I’m writing this at the table of my tiny kitchen...
read more at Houselove Posted 1 week 2 days ago.
For two weeks I’ve been getting emails from a guy named Bob Chen in China. Bob works in the Asian Domain registration department, located in 8/F XiYu building No.52 JinDun Road,QingYang District,Chengdu City, China. In his first email, he wanted to know if I had authorized the "Roris Industrial Co. Ltd" to use my name in a dozen domain names, such as ronaldtanner.asia. My first reaction was, Why would a company named "Roris" use "ronaldtanner" for anything? Well, I’ve seen stranger things and, although I suspected that this might be a scam, I have never been scammed from China...
read more at Houselove Posted 3 weeks 5 days ago.
My photographer friend Vinny brought his Marathon cab over today. I’ve always liked the Marathon. It’s a tank of a vehicle, the boxiest, most spacious car you’ll ever find. It has big bench seats and enough leg room to accommodate a Great Dane. The dash is metal, of course, and the bumpers are formidable enough to be on a garbage truck. The Maraton was built as a taxi and it was, in fact, the classic Yellow Checker Cab — unchanged in design since it was first produced in 1960. They stopped making them in 1982. The Marathon’s charm is its simplicity. As Vinny puts it: “It’s the kind of design you’d get from a child’s drawing of a car.” The first time I saw one, I wanted it. I’m a sucker for vintage cars. The last one I owned was a 1966 Plymouth Valiant station wagon...
read more at Houselove Posted 6 weeks 1 day ago.
I solved a musical mystery today. The mystery was this: every time I visited a certain bathroom at my place of work, I would leave humming Black Cow by Steely Dan. About the third time it happened, I stopped dead in my tracks and said, What the hell? If it weren’t so funny, it might have freaked me out. When it kept happening, I figured it was just me, not the mystery bathroom. For some reason known only to the deepest recesses of my psyche, that bathroom was always going to be my Steely Dan Black Cow trigger. But this morning I was in this same bathroom and then, when I reached for the automatic paper towel dispenser, I heard it: the dispenser whined the first two notes of Black Cow’s distinctive opening. I was relieved about this (no pun). I like to know where my music comes from...
read more at Houselove Posted 7 weeks 4 days ago.
It’s a good word. By “good,” I mean a word that does the work it’s made for. If you believe in progress, you should conclude that f**k — the expletive — is the product of arduous field-testing and development. Centuries of testing. No other English word comes close to expressing abject outrage and frustration. I use it whenever my work around the house goes awry. I start with “Oh my f**king God!” then end with “Oh just f**k me!” This may go on for a while. It’s quite therapeutic. If we didn’t have f**k, we’d have to invent it. Therein lies the irony of every objection to the word. Saying “snap!” or “fudgedragon!” just isn’t going to cut it. Any honest person will admit as much...
read more at Houselove Posted 8 weeks 4 days ago.
I’m on the road this week, promoting From Animal House to Our House: A Love Story in North Carolina, my home state. But the camper van is not ready. It’s so not ready that pots and pans are flying around in the back, cabinet doors are swinging open, latches are rattling loose, light shades are careening in their sconces, and tools are skating across the floor like hockey pucks. When I make a quick stop, the futon heaves off its bench seat and lands behind me with such force I feel a sudden breeze. The solar panels on my roof aren’t working and so I’m calling the solar supply people in New Mexico every other day. My inverter (converts power from the batteries) wasn’t working until this morning, when I finally figured it out. But its remote control panel still doesn’t work...
read more at Houselove Posted 10 weeks 1 day ago.
In writing the story of how Jill and I bought a wrecked frat house and tried to bring it back to its original Victorian splendor and keep our then-early love alive at the same, I had a hell of a hard time. That book, From Animal House to Our House: A Love Story, is out today from Academy Chicago Publishers. Why was it so hard to write this book? Because life is messy, messy, messy. In any snippet taken from my life or yours, there is never only one story. There are many strands of many stories running through everything we do — the story of your working life, the story of your dreaming life, the story of your love life, the story of your domestic life, and so on...
read more at Houselove Posted 13 weeks 4 days ago.
The last time I had a problem with my web host, my blog had disappeared. Completely disappeared. That’s 160+ entires that cover my weekly blogging for the last four years. Was I freaking out? Yes, I was freaking out. When I called tech support, I found myself talking to somebody in Eastern Europe. Sarajevo, I imagined. Eastern European tech support is more or less competent. I mean, they get the job done most of the time if the problem isn’t a big one. But this was a big problem and I didn’t have much confidence in this too long-distance help, especially when the tech I was talking to asked me three times for the name of my domain: he couldn’t quite spell it...
read more at Houselove Posted 14 weeks 6 days ago.
I received another speeding ticket yesterday — my third this month. These are tickets issued by the city’s new robo speed-trap cameras, strategically placed along roads you’d never think would have speed traps. The offending speeds are 38 MPH in a 20 MPH zone or 41 in a 30 MPH zone. Miniscule speeds on roads you’d swear were 35 MPH zones at least. If I have pulled in 3 tickets in a month — and I’m no drag-racer — you can bet that just about every driver in the city is getting a ticket once a month, if not every week. You’d think everybody would be up in arms but the city is smart about it: the speeding violations cost a flat $40 and don’t go on your record (i.e., you don’t get “points”). As a result, most speeders won’t protest the violation...
read more at Houselove Posted 16 weeks 9 hours ago.