Want even better news? We're also giving away two tickets to the tour right here on the blog.

As you can probably guess, we're a little bit excited about this whole adventure, but we're also a bit frantic. I mean, after experiencing this festive weekend as a spectator for the past 12 years, this is our first opportunity to be a participant, so we have some pretty big expectations of our own to live up to.

If you're not familiar with the Scottish Christmas Walk Weekend, let us fill you in on some of the details. After all, it is one of our favorite events of the year, and one of the prime reasons we think it's pretty great to live in Old Town Alexandria.

Each year during the first weekend of December, the Campagna Center hosts their annual Scottish Christmas Walk Weekend. This year marks the 42nd year of the event, which is a multi-day celebration covering the streets of Old Town Alexandria. The Scottish Christmas Walk Weekend celebrates the Scottish heritage of Alexandria, the shopping associated with Christmas, and the pomp and circumstance of a good parade. Throw in a little Scotch tasting the evening before, a whole bunch of men wearing skirts, and an official sponsorship by the Scottish government, and you've got yourself a recipe for a wonderful and festive weekend.

Yep, that's me on the left.

And if there are two things Old Town does really well, they're Christmas and men in skirts.

After the Friday evening marketplace and "Taste of Scotland" Scotch tasting, the weekend's events on Saturday kick off with a parade full of bagpipes and Christmas spirit. The streets of old town are packed with pipe and drum bands, dogs, antique cars, city government officials waving to the crowd, and Scottish clan representations from around the area. 

Following the parade, hundreds of visitors enjoy the annual Holiday Designer Tour of Homes, where several private residences around Old Town are open for all to see. That's where we fit in. 

Home from last year's tour. We have a lot to live up to...

While we were on vacation back in September we were contacted out of the blue by one of the chairs of the Designer Tour of Homes. The chair that wrote to us happens to be a reader of our blog and she was coordinating the various homes that would be on this year's tour. Her email asked if we'd be interested in participating in the tour as one of the subject houses. To say we were shocked, flattered, dumbfounded, excited, and surprised would all be an understatement.

Wendy and I have long talked (primarily in a joking manner) about the possibility of being on one of Old Town's home tours. A home tour was one of the events that first introduced us to the interiors of homes in Old Town, and the various tours over the years have allowed us to gain glimpses into some of the most interesting, grand, beautiful, and awe inspiring homes in our surrounding neighborhood. As a result, the thought of our tiny little 15 foot wide row house appearing on a tour of homes alongside multi-million dollar places that are literally jaw dropping is almost unimaginable. Surely the email we received asking about the tour had to have been a mistake? Perhaps our wide angle lens made our house look far larger than it actually is? 

After much internal deliberation (that's code for us freaking out a lot and exclaiming many times over, "What if our house sucks and it's the worst one on the tour?"), Wendy and I decided we should throw caution to the wind, pull the trigger, and in the name of supporting a local charitable organization, just go for it. We excitedly wrote back to let her know our interest in participating and began working on the next steps to make this thing we always thought of as a pipe dream a reality. The main reason behind our decision to go for it? We love Christmas, it's for a good cause, and we think it's going to be a whole lot of fun!

Each homeowner on the tour is paired with a local florist and interior designer to pull together the whole look. Last week we met with our home's team to begin putting together a game plan. We're going to be working with Wendy's favorite local florist, Helen Olivia, as well as one of our blog readers and local designer, Sarah Bohl. Sarah also happens to be the person who thought it was a pretty great idea to contact us about the tour, so we're really glad she's our designer. We'll also have an elaborate table setting provided for the day that is sure to turn our red dining room into a veritable Christmas Party wonderland.

Last year Sarah was the designer for another home on the tour, and she did a spectacular job. She used old books as the inspiration and wove pages into almost every facet of the design. Here's a photo from the dining room, including the handmade wreath above the fireplace made from pages taken from a book.

You might recognize that dining room as it's in an 18th century home that was one of our Open Housing subject homes from earlier this year. Needless to say, we're super excited for the collaborative efforts that will surely result from this event, and for the final and beautiful look of our house. We're also especially excited to share the whole process and results with all of you. You had better believe you'll be seeing a lot of photos in the coming weeks. 

Now Wendy and I have the pressure on us! We have just a few weeks to finish up a laundry list of items around the house, including the ongoing sun porch project. Wish us luck.

We really hope that those of you that are local will be able to make it. And I said earlier, it all supports a great cause. If you're interested in purchasing tickets to the Designer Tour of Homes, or learning about any of the other Scottish Christmas Walk Weekend events, visit the Campagna Center's website. We also hope you'll stop back later today for a chance to win two tickets to the home tour.

Does your town have a local holiday celebration that you enjoy each year? Any special traditions you have that make you feel like the holiday season has officially begun? Any thoughts on us being the tiny house on the tour that everyone says "How did that house make it on the list?" Sure, maybe we're being a little bit neurotic, especially given the awesome team of people that will be getting the house ready with us, but the voice is still in the back of our minds.

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We've been hard at work on a couple of projects around Old Town Home lately, some that we hope are interesting, and a few others that are...hopefully going to be more interesting once a little more is done. While we've been spending lots of time on various tasks that are not particularly sexy, like insulation and duct work, we've also been quite hard at work on a feature or two here on the blog. It's funny, work on the blog can be nearly the same level of efforts as home renovation, just less dirty. So why not share some of our progress on the blog with you. At least it's way more interesting than what else we've been doing lately...

Now that we've been up and running for over a year and we've amassed quite a few posts on various topics under our e-belts, we just feel like there needs to be a better way to organize some of our more relevant posts. Our old projects page was a complete mess, complete with a smattering of some projects here and there, more crucial projects omitted from the page, outdated material, and just an unpleasing layout.

Ugh. We know we can do better, so we decided to focus our efforts on beautifying this space. If you click on the "Projects" link in the navigation bar you can see the updated layout. It's categorized, more up to date, holds a lot better information, and best of all, lots of pictures. You can click on any given thumbnail to go right to that post, or click on the "see more" link on any category to see all posts that fall into that given category. We'll be continually updating this page as we put up new and relevant posts for each section, so you can easily reference the stuff we do that you care about most from this page. We really hope you like it.

I know, I know, this isn't home renovation, it's blog renovation, but we've been working really hard on it, so we wanted to take a moment to highlight it for everyone (otherwise you'd just go on about your day thinking we still had our old, crappy projects page, and we can't have that). We hope you like the new layout and the organization of information. Let us know what you think, we'd love to hear it.

While we're at it, in other blogging news, I think I've finally figured out the issue with duplicate posts in everyone's Google Reader. This issue only took me about a year to figure out, but I finally tracked down the bug. Honest, I blame Google. :-)

Hear me out through my rambling technical explanation. When we built the blog, I included RSS feeds on almost everything. The home page, category pages, archive pages, individual posts pages -- they ALL had RSS feeds listed in the meta data of the HTML. I figured this would be a great way to let people subscribe to feeds that they really care about, so if you only care about Woodworking, and someone else only cares about Open Housing, each person could subscribe only to that feed. Well, apparently Google Reader didn't like my idea. Google Reader viewed each of these feeds as unique items from Old Town Home, and even though they all had the same URL, Google Reader put them in as "new" items. The end result was that everyone who subscribed to any of our feeds were getting four, five, six, or more duplicate posts every day. Annoying!

Many readers let us know about this annoyance, but I didn't know how to deal with it. Google Reader doesn't have a good method of debugging or troubleshooting, so this one came down to just thinking through the problem. Why am I rambling on about this rather than just saying "hey, it's fixed"? I figure that some day, someone will search for "Google Reader Duplicate Posts" because they're having the same issue, and we may just have the answer they're looking for. Wishful thinking, perhaps, but it's there just in case.

There you have it, our little update on the blog front. We have a list of other site improvements we're working on too behind the scenes (ahem, our floor plan), but we'll get to all of those when we have time. Until then, we need to get back to work on the extra boring items in our house. I think I need to go water the vegetable garden or crawl back up into the sauna of our attic. Oh joy.

Do you have anything you'd like to see us implement or fix on our blog? Let us know, we'd love to be able to work on stuff that make's everyone's experience better.

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To be perfectly honest, we were both a little nervous going into it. This was the first time either of us have done anything like it outside of work-related public speaking, so we didn't want to be boring, obnoxious, or clueless, nor did we want to publicly humiliate ourselves. To our pleasant surprise, we felt like we were able to give some decent answers to the DIY questions from the group.

The thing is, Wendy and I have opposite presentation styles, so it made prep a little hard. She's a preparer and rehearse-er, where I'm a wing-er and prayer-er. But in the end, much like in life and our renovation, our opposite styles, strengths, and approaches helped to give the people who attended a (hopefully) entertaining and enjoyable evening. Let's be honest, it didn't hurt that there was wine and delicious cupcakes to be had.

And there were also plenty of great products around the store that could distract from any lack of knowledge we may have had.

Our invitation to this workshop and a few previous conversations with DIYers on the Internet got us thinking. We've gained a lot of DIY knowhow and understanding on how a project can be completed. Sure, we're not pros or anything, but if something we've done in the past can either help another person avoid some mistakes or end up with a job well done, we'd love to share. What's better? We have a very knowledgeable group of readers that frequent this site that can add to our answers, or possibly step in when we have nuthin'.

So as of today we're starting a new section called "Ask Old Town Home." You'll have the opportunity to ask and have your questions answered to the best of our ability. Just head on over to our "Ask" form and fill out any questions you may have about our projects, your projects, a recipe you saw on our site, Alexandria, Washington, DC, or or anything you think we may be able to help you with. 

You'll be able to get to the "Ask" form at any time using the "Ask Old Town Home" button (pictured above), located in the right hand column of the blog.

As we receive questions we'll review them and will do blog posts where we answer some of the top (judged arbitrarily by Wendy and myself) submissions. Best of all, if we haven't a clue, there's a pretty good chance one of our readers will be able to chime in to provide their insight.

What do you think? Do you have a burning question about any of the work we've done? Or maybe you're stumped on a project and want a little nudge. Shoot us a line and we'll give you our non-scientific approach and reply.

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We'll be taking questions, sharing stories, and trying our absolute best to use our hard earned DIY knowledge (and awareness of our many mistakes) to help your projects along. If you're in the area and want to participate, you can register on the Red Barn website's DIY Workshop page.

If you're in the area, we'd absolutely love to see you there! But even if you can't make it, we'd love to answer some of your DIY questions.

It's a little bit of a shock to us that we're doing this sort of thing since we never really consider our DIY skills particularly unique. When Red Barn's owner, Amy, started talking to us about the possibility of doing a seminar a little while ago we thought, "Great, we'd love to help people out and try to convince others they are completely capable of taking on big time projects." Amy typically does these types of themed events every so often with local shop owners and bloggers. We attended one before Christmas on gift wrapping tips that was put on by Dawn from Idle Hands. As a result, we've been trying to think of what makes us somehow uniquely suited to answer people's questions when it comes to DIY home renovation and home design/decoration items.

To be completely honest, we're just a tad bit intimidated to host this seminar, but at the same time, we're both excited for the opportunity to share our knowledge and experiences. Ever since we committed to the date for the workshop I've had this feeling of intimidation and excitement, and that's when I realized it, this is the exact same reason why our participation in this DIY seminar has any value.

When Wendy and I decide to take on a project we make a commitment to ourselves to see it through, no matter how little skills or experience we have with what we are setting out to do. At the onset, we're always a little bit intimidated by the idea of tackling something new or time consuming, but we have enough determination to ensure we're going to do the job right (even if it takes years). From start of the project and through to completion, we also have great sense of anticipation and excitement for what the end result will bring. Personally, I have the same feeling whether we're patching a crack in the wall as I do if we're taking on a major bathroom or room renovation.

The thing is, when we purchased our home, we didn't have any significant DIY experience under our proverbial DIY tool belts. Rather than experience, we had drive and anticipation (and a significant dose of naiveté) in our corner, and we were excited to learn and to try our hand at creating and reinvigorating things on our own. Though our initial reasons for taking on projects rather than hiring out had to do very significantly with cost savings (we were broke homeowners), we soon learned that there's nothing quite like the quality, pride, and excitement of a job done yourself. As we've slowly transitioned from DIY out of necessity to DIY out of desire, our basic goals of every project have remained the same. Do our research, do it right, do our best, and be proud of what we've done. 

Over the years our determination, Wendy's eye for design and overall vision, our appreciation for the history of our home, and my ability to figure out pretty much anything as long as I can find an online resource to guide me, have positioned us for many years of successful projects that we've completed on our own. Over the last nine years we've pretty much done it all. From structural to electrical, plumbing to plastering, roofing to siding, and windows to woodworking, there's almost nothing in our house I'm not confident we can take on. That being said, I'm still intimidated when we start a project, but I'm always excited for the outcome, no matter how hard or disgusting the process of getting there may be.

This combination of intimidation and excitement helps to keep my interest and our desire to see the work through to completion. We're still the same people who bought our house with a desire to "fix it up", but our goals and skills have changed tremendously along the way. It's out hope that our experiences can be useful inspiration to readers on this blog, and to the people who attend out first ever DIY seminar at Red Barn on April 26th. 

What are your reasons for and feelings on DIY? Do you do it out of necessity or out of desire? Do you have any similar senses of intimidation and excitement like I described? Or do you have any burning questions you'd like to ask us if you were able to attend (and we really hope you can attend if you're in the area). Let us know, we'd love to hear your take on everything.

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Wendy and I have been working on our house for just over nine years now (and blogging about the adventure for about one year). During this same period we've seen other homes renovated, skyscrapers built, neighborhoods constructed, children grow up, even massive bridges and highway projects erected (and we all know how long those take). Well, we're still not done with our house, but I think we're pretty much done with our house.

Not only are we not done renovating, we're not even close to done, and we just don't see the value in it anymore.

Sure, this whole process was kind of...an experience. But most of all, we didn't get much out of it. So what now? Well...

We're putting our house up on the market. We figure it's a good time. We don't have a ton of personal investment in the house, so we're ready to just move on.

We'll be spending the next several weeks taking out much of the historic character we added back into the house over the years (you can get big bucks for it at salvage yards you know), and we'll be working to make the whole house neutral.

We're hoping to get a buyer who wants to just renovate the whole house as a complete gut job. We're really hoping for a buyer whose only real vocabulary in a house is "open concept floor plan." I mean, that's the only thing that might make the house decent.

Once we sell our house, I think we're going to buy a house in the middle of the 'burbs, something built in the 2000s preferably. Our hope is that we won't have to do anything to the house in the least bit. We'll be able to just move in, furnish it, and we'll be good to go.

We'll probably sell all of our current furniture on Craigslist and just buy a large furniture set from Marlo or something. If we're really lucky, we'll have enough room for one of those extra deep couches.

We'll be sure to blog about the whole project, or at least the lack of projects. I really can't wait to live in a place like this. I'm over old houses, don't care about history, don't see myself as any sort of a steward, and would like to wish you all a happy April Fool's Day. See you all on Monday.

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