A blog account of house and life renovation 2012-2013.

This was my first attempt at several things: a major renovation of a century-old building, and concurrent blogging about it using a WordPress-hosted site (which may still be online). The prologue to the book (pdf, 26MB), explains it a little further:

Prologue to This Odd House

This is a collection of blog entries that documented a unique time in my life.  I was rebuilding it, and the metaphor in remodeling an old house is apt. 

Blogging does not come naturally to me.  It requires a certain discipline, along with a certain lack of it.  The entries need to be chronologic and current, but the contents must be casual and stream-of-consciousness-like, not the careful, well-researched and cautious prose I am accustomed to writing in my profession.  I tried to strike a balance, but it resulted in late entries often with too much information.

Still, it was a therapeutic aspect of the project, and I am pleased to look back five years on and rediscover the pleasure of acquired experiences and lessons learned.  I submit them here in a collected book-like form. 

The pages are the equivalent of “screen captures” of the web page contents, cleaned up of intruding links and web debris, but not holding to a consistent format or style (whenever I encounter web technology I wonder “how could this ever work?”).  To avoid fighting the tools, this is what I could do, without re-doing it.

A copy will be placed in the time capsule to conceal in the renovated kitchen.  Someone, in the next hundred years, may encounter it as they decide that my choices are not theirs, and decide to make it over once again, perhaps as their own life-renewing project.

Thor Olson, writing pseudonymously as Torr Oslo
February 2018