A little about who we are and what this blog is about seems like a good place to start…

We’re Chris and Heather Stockard. We’ve bought a somewhat neglected 70’s Northwest contemporary home in a nice neighborhood of Bellingham, Washington and will be updating, modernizing, and repairing it for the next couple of years. We’ll be sharing our triumphs and failures along the way on this blog. For our friends it’ll be a way for you to share the journey. For other aspiring renovators we hope that sharing our experiences will help you achieve your dreams.

For the past thirteen years we have been off cruising our sailboat to Mexico, Central and South America, the Caribbean, and the Bahamas. It was a great experience, but we’ve decided it is time to return to land once again. If you’re interested in our travels you can visit the Legacy Sailing website. While we were cruising Mexico, Heather wrote a guide to food and provisioning and started a food blog, The Cruising Cook’s Blog.

This isn’t our first renovation rodeo. In 1976 we bought a log cabin in Fairbanks and decided that it need expansion so jacked it up 12 feet into the air and built a foundation beneath it which we finished complete with spiral staircase. One of the benefits (or maybe problems) with building outside of Fairbanks was the complete lack of zoning or building inspection. It was a great opportunity to discover by trial and error what not to do in construction, plumbing, and electrical jobs! We then built a new home in Fairbanks where Chris got to work with the contractor on the construction crew for much of the summer learning the right way to do many tasks. Repairs and renovations of houses in Anchorage and Juneau followed as did extensive repair and remodeling of Chris’ mother’s house in Lexington, Massachusetts. Along the way we’ve learned to balance do-it-yourself jobs with those best left to professionals.