Welcome to Pleasant Valley Ranch
The (ongoing) story of a guy, a girl, and a house in east Austin.
Follow our toil, trouble, and triumph as we attempt to remodel an average 1946 bungalow into our dream home.
More below...
The (ongoing) story of a guy, a girl, and a house in east Austin.
Follow our toil, trouble, and triumph as we attempt to remodel an average 1946 bungalow into our dream home.
More below...
It’s taken us 14 years to get to this point, but it’s starting to come together.
Finally got to put the deck on the roof, and it’s marvelous.
Making it all so much more comfy with AC and insulation and lights and internet and toilets!
This better be the last ditch we ever have to dig, because it’s getting really old and so are we.
Finishing out the back building with siding and some pretty purple paint.
Finally, we have electricity and lights in the new building.
Finally, enclosing these spaces with doors and windows.
Made the porch look gorgeous, and almost caught the house on fire. Just another weekend at PVR!
No more climbing a ladder to get to the roof. We have a spiral staircase now!
Check it out, we’re adding some actual design features to that new building in the back.
Metal and fire! Metal and fire! Metal and fire!
Getting ready for the new building starts with demolition and playing in the dirt, as usual…
Oh my god, I thought it would never happen, but the house is pretty again…
While tile is awesome in the bathroom, it’s only metallic epoxy for us in the kitchen…
My favorite category of porn, well that and chandelier porn…
Turns out, tile is one of my favorite things. Really makes a group of walls look like a bathroom…
Time to get rid of the old dorm furniture…
The house is getting prettier on the outside too…
Even more progress on the bathroom. Almost tile ready…
This house is starting to look like a…well…a house…
This room feels pretty, with such a pretty wall, such a pretty stove, such a pretty window…
Getting up more ceilings, walls, and lights…
One of the sexier posts in the blog. Chandelier porn!
Walls are good, but insulated walls are better…
Nothing brightens your day quite like a beautiful new porch…
Finally getting the prettier walls on this place, as well as Errek’s ingenious skin vent for efficiency…
A new AC and electrical system can make all the difference, lifestyle-wise…
Sometimes buying a tub is one of the more traumatic thing you have to do…
From the past to the future, and we’re still completely insane…
Moving the kitchen to it’s new permanent home, and making the walls straight…
It’s time to party like it’s really, really cold outside…and inside…
Finally, at long last, we’re connecting the new house to the old…
Stud walls are only theoretical “walls.” It was time for some honest-to-God walls…
Celebrated another year of art and friendships at E.A.S.T…
Seriously though, nothing is quite as precious as a good roof…
Tearing up the roof is not actually as fun as it sounds…
Getting a new roof is awesome, unless it rains after you’ve removed the old roof and before you’ve covered it up…
Nothing says progress like new walls and fireworks…
Who would have thought that putting down new subfloor would be this awesome…and this challenging…
Taking down some old walls in order to building some new ones…
We lost a beloved member of the family. So this is her tribute…
Time to fix the water main pipe that the dump truck crushed…
Now we’re talking. It’s time for the heavy construction to begin. Gotta start from the ground up, right, so first thing’s first — new foundation…
To put in the new foundation, all we had to do was take out the old concrete porch. Yeah, that’s all…
Time to replace that evil, villainous water heater with a new on-demand unit…
In order to expand the footprint backwards, we had to first get rid of all the stuff behind the house, like the carport and the shed. Fortunately, we had some help…
Time for more demolition. This time it’s the kitchen that’s on the chopping block…
Finally, with the permits in hand we can start construction in earnest and the first step is demolition…
Strange that the paperwork is more if a hurdle than the construction itself, but alas…
When you live in a city like Austin, nothing gets done without a permit. Welcome to the wonderful world of bureaucracy…
Time to take down the laundry room, but first we move the laundry into the house…
Our third year on the East Austin Studio Tour was a huge success and a lot of fun…
Explore our plans for the future dreamhouse, as they’re finally put to paper…
Fences make great neighbors, but the absence of a fence makes mowing easier…
When you want to borrow against the value of the house, and your house is a wreck of a construction site…
Since the dream kitchen is still several years off on the horizon, it was time for an improvement to our temp set up…
We participated in the East Austin Studio Tour for a second year…
Finishing out the bathroom…
Now that we have silky smooth finished walls, it’s time for some woodworking…
Adding some layers of the floor to the living room is no small feat…
Every time we level a different part of the house, the porch droops just a little more. Time to level that baby up…
Five walls, what is this room a pentagon? No silly, we’re attacking the top of the box — the ceiling…
Framing the center wall and adding a pocket door for the bathroom…
Some jobs are just pure crap. The sewer line replacement was (in every possible way) that job…
Finally, it’s time to tackle the living room…
Finally, we’re ready to add a second room to our living space…
With the bathroom in a good place it was time to convert our one-room house to a one bedroom house…
Not only do we have a working toilet and shower, we have lights in the bathroom…
Ducks in trees. It’s like “Where’s Waldo?” if Waldo were a duck…in a tree. Also, so many cats..
The epic story of what happens when hot water heaters attack…
Building a shower is hard, and it turns out the endless tiling was the least of our troubles…
It turns out that tiling is some sort of test of faith. Faith in what, I do not know…
Adventures in remodeling often involve blood, sweat, tears, and even some weird porch sex…
With a cold front in, it was time to make the house temperature controlled(ish)…
Time to finish out the bathroom so we can shower at home. Turns out, this is actually really complicated and takes a lot of time…
The living room, with its two foot span joists straddling a three foot drop, was…well…not safe. Time for floors…
For a toilet to work, you need running water, and a garden hose is only funny for one or two flushes, then it’s annoying….
Hip hip hooray. We’re seeing progress in the form of a flushable toilet…
By the end of demolition we had a house with no floors or bathroom, but we had a plan…
Originally there was this whole big plan, but then we just started ripping…
The house is cute…though crooked and tired. Still, look at that porch, and the window screens…
This is how it all began, the story of Pleasant Valley Ranch…
