It was while I was in the middle of framing and insulating my basement that I first found the mysterious leak in my basement. One sunny day I was happily putting up steel framing and when I returned the next rainy day I found a pie-plate sized puddle forming right where the basement foundation and cinder block walls met.

My basement has always been bone dry until I found this leak, which suddenly had me wondering if I should even bother to refinish …

I didn’t want to have my home’s air ducts cleaned but my wife saw a coupon in one of our local papers that advertised a “$39.95″ special that included a cleaning of 10 vents and 1 intake trunk of a forced air heating or AC system. A while ago I asked the question, “Is It Really Necessary To Have Your Air Ducts Cleaned?” so I was skeptical, but our house is over 50 years old and the vents had never been properly vacuumed out to my knowledge. …

This is about my recent adventure in putting together a set of outside stairs on the side of my house. This is not a how-to article, but rather, an article about what not to do.

We had a new sliding glass door put into our house a few weeks ago, but we haven’t been able to use it because the door is three feet off the ground and exits out over a flowerbed. Instead of continually walking outside and plunging into the petunias I decided to save some money and build a set of stairs myself. Things …

I don’t have a lot of time to surf the web everyday reading hundreds of different blogs, but one of the blogs I often skim over once or twice a week is The Simple Dollar. It’s a financial blog written for people who want to get a handle on their finances that is written by an average guy (and good writer) named Trent Hamm.

Trent’s latest entry is about a Do-It-Yourself project that went wrong for him. After attempting to replace a faucet he comes up against an obstacle that’s beyond his skills and has …