Our Last Renovation

How we remodeled our home and lived to tell the tale (mostly)

Author

Carl Howe

Preface

This book chronicles how we renovated our home in the hopes that we will be able to age in place. I hope that by documenting our renovation project from start to finish, we can help others understand the process and tradeoffs needed to do (or at least contract for) this type of renovation. Carolyn and I have no significant construction skills beyond knowing which end of a hammer to hold, so we’ve been fortunate to have the counsel of renovation experts to guide us through this project. I’m hoping others will benefit from our experience.

As of early 2026, this book is a work in progress. The process of how we went from a cool idea (e.g., “Let’s install an elevator!”) for aging in place to a fully realized new home was a long one and wasn’t a straight line.

We started this project in 2023, but I’ve only started writing about it this year. While we now have the benefit of hindsight, I’ve attempted to write all the chapters in the moment when they occurred (i.e., without foreknowledge of what was to come). Our assumptions and decisions made early in the project didn’t always work out, and I’ve tried to leave those glitches in the narrative. We did learn a lot along the way, and I hope it shows by the time we reach the end.

I plan to write to the following outline:

  1. How we decided to age in place
  2. This old but still pretty greats house
  3. Taking our first steps with an architect
  4. Settling on an overall design
  5. A birthday and a parts list
  6. A conversation piece: the 6-stop elevator
  7. Do we really need a dormer?
  8. Deciding on a general contractor
  9. Things I learned from interviewing contractors
  10. Nightmares and a decision
  11. Signing the contract
  12. Getting started
  13. So many choices
  14. Paying for our renovation
  15. Finding a new place to live
  16. Celebrating and downsizing
  17. That’s one small step….
  18. Moving Day!
  19. Demolition
  20. Project management
  21. Shafts and rafters
  22. Beam me up Scotty
  23. Living within our electrical means
  24. Parting is such sweet sorrow, especially when it’s mohogany
  25. Destruction and reconstruction
  26. Scope creep? We plead guilty as charged
  27. Creating an internet strategy
  28. Surprise number two
  29. Returning to our home
  30. Lessons learned: How did we do?
  31. The wrap party

Given this is a work in progress, the table of contents will likely change over time. Chapters that have no links in them have yet to be written. It’s now almost the beginning of 2026, and I’m hoping to write a chapter every week or three until we’re done (after all, we have to pack up and move back soon!).

Oh, one more thing: I promise that all of these posts are completely AI-free and written by me personally. If you see a typewriter em-dash (i.e., a separator made up of two hyphens like this –), that’s only a habit I’ve picked up when I was an analyst at Forrester, not an indication of AI-generated text.1 Further, unless otherwise noted, I took all the photographs shown in these posts, and I reserve all rights to them.2

I hope you enjoy the story! -Carl

  1. See articles like this one for how em-dashes are often characteristic of ChatGPT-generated content. https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-telltale-sign-that-you-used-chatgpt-and-a-trick-to-avoid-it/↩︎

  2. Copyright 2025 by Carl Howe. All rights reserved. Contact me directly for permission to use them elsewhere.↩︎