Yowsa, getting near the end of the week
The working on house projects stuff comes from days of yore. I was Marshall in our fraternity, which meant organizing work projects on the house, so even though I didn't know much about any particular activity I got to learn from the people who did know about different things. 20 years later, when I bought my own place, it was an "oh, yeah, I kinda remember this" moment. I've never gone crazy on tools, but would look at any given thing that came up, figure out what the tool cost was to do it myself, the degree of difficulty, ended up slowly acquiring things, tackling bigger projects. The addition was a big project, but likely cost about 1/3 what it would have been to hire it out, and I know the end result was solidly built, no corners cut; I did pull a proper permit for it, but didn't bother having the inspector come by after the second inspection point -- he saw that I drew up plans that were nicely detailed, and on the first two inspections (foundations and rough framing/deck completion) saw that I really was putting in extra safety margin on everything I did, spent time checking on some things that he wanted to use for future reference as good ways to do things. When he saw the gazebo down in the glen he just shook his head and smiled, since that one I hadn't done a permit on (an advantage to living outside of main cities/suburbs -- codes officers can be pretty reasonable about things

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