By Courtney Brianne Mabeus
Special to The Washington Post
Saturday, April 22, 2006; F01
As her husband stood nearby on a ladder, Amanda Forster sat poised, digital camera and laptop computer at hand, ready to chronicle the ordeal re-hanging kitchen cabinets to fit around a new stainless steel refrigerator.
A few hours and several bumps in the road later, a new posting describing the project appeared on the couple's blog, Nightmare on Elm Street. They named the posting "The Kitchen Cabinet Sideways Shuffle," in part because it took two tries to get everything right.
That posting, made in October, was one of many the couple has made since Amanda Forster, 27, a government scientist, started the blog in July. It happened accidentally, she said. She was on the Internet looking for some tips on tuck-pointing when her surfing led her to the renovation journals of other homeowners across the country on Houseblogs.net.
Already a year into their own renovations on a 90-year-old brick duplex in Frederick, she decided that she and her husband, Aaron, 32, had a lot to offer other do-it-yourselfers. They have become part of a fast-growing Internet niche community of like-minded folks facing similar projects, from a couple renovating an 1863 brownstone in Brooklyn to a family in Ontario whose blog, Savaged Beauty, declares, "It's the journey, not the aggravation." There is even a couple in Estonia who blog about their plan to build their dream home.
"Since I was finding so much information on other people's sites, I thought it would be good to try and help other people," Amanda Forster said.
Bloggers, or people who write what are essentially Internet journals, weigh in on just about every conceivable topic in Washington -- from politics and scandalous sexual trysts with Capitol Hill aides to mundane urban life and parenting. As the metropolitan area's housing prices spiraled to new heights last year, real estate-related blogs proliferated.
Not surprisingly, discussions on whether the real estate "bubble" will burst have multiplied right alongside musings over window frames and plumbing.
The remodeling blogs vary in tone and content. Some are painstakingly detailed; others are sarcastic. Some bloggers have a professional touch while others apologize over sideways pictures or no pictures at all because of malfunctioning digital cameras or computers. The basic message is the same, though: Renovating is expensive and backbreaking but it is also humanizing. Anyone who has ever spackled a wall or hung drywall can relate.
Some adopt a theme. The Home Improvement Ninja, who in one dispatch dated Jan. 12 asked, "Does my house make me look fat?," is one such blogger.
The Ninja is a 35-year-old Columbia Heights rowhouse owner named Peter, who asked that his last name not be used to keep his Internet identity separate from his real-world job with the government. However, he insists he adopted the Ninja persona not because of stealth, "but more to the realization that I do my best work in the dead of night with tools that look deceptively simple but are deadly when I wield them . . . mostly due to my incompetence with them," as he explained in his first post Nov. 22.
Peter's entry into the blogosphere began much the way that the Forsters' did -- he was searching for ideas to help restore his 100-year-old rowhouse, which he bought about a year ago after having sold a studio in Dupont Circle. The blog also helps him deal with some of the more frustrating aspects, such as contractors who left him with more work than when they started.
"I started just sort of accidentally reading mostly other people's [blogs]. It's almost like a support group," he said in an interview. "Once I start writing, it goes pretty quickly."
Plus, he said he doubts a therapist would know much about plumbing, so instead he turns to his blog to vent, rant or rave. A recent rave concerned a new power drill he bought -- "24 volts, baby," he wrote. A rant concerned a home improvement supply store that he often leaves empty-handed.
Peter said he is careful not to post when he is too frustrated. When a project overwhelms him, he will leave the house. New posts typically occur in the mornings, though he said he sometimes thinks for hours about what he will write.
Amanda and Aaron Forster will often go right for the blog when a day's work is done. Ordering a pizza and having a beer during the process probably helps relieve a little of the stress, too.
"Usually, I'll either be covered in dust from working or I'll take a shower and put on my pajamas," Amanda Forster said. "I think if you'll look back through the archives, you'll see where we're frustrated."
After living for a few years in a new but shoddily constructed townhouse that seemed to be crumbling around them, the Forsters in 2004 found a three-bedroom brick duplex that seemed a perfect fit. When they moved in, they already knew about some electrical issues found during a home inspection. Then other problems came out of the, well, woodwork.
Their first posting, in July 2005, was a laundry list of things they had to deal with, and then a disclaimer:
"We're not complaining about the work that we have to do on the house -- we've gotten way past that and have learned to take this stuff in stride," Amanda Forster wrote.
Now, the irony of the couple's Elm Street address matching that of a series of 1980s horror flicks does not seem lost on the couple.
"It's like every time we take something off, we find something new to fix," Amanda Forster said, standing in a kitchen full of new appliances as her husband leaned against a counter. "Most of the appliances died right after we moved in. We didn't know anything about working on a house."
Luckily for them, there is an expanding Internet community out there with a wide range of experience -- from novice to professional. Houseblogs.net has registered more than 230 bloggers all working toward the same goal; a discussion forum has just been added there. The Home Improvement Ninja and Nightmare on Elm Street are both Houseblogs members, though there are likely hundreds of other such sites out there that have not registered.
The Chicago husband-and-wife team behind Houseblogs started the site in January 2005 as a way to swap stories and tips with other renovators. Their personal blog, House in Progress, which outlines their efforts to renovate a 1914 Craftsman bungalow, counts as many as 63,000 unique visitors per month.
Local bloggers haven't reached that level of popularity yet, but they do have some faithful readers. For example, Peter's rant about the home improvement supply store generated 10 responses.
"I can see why they call it 'house porn,' " Peter said during a tour of his mostly-gutted three-level Victorian.
Although they have never met in person, Peter and the Forsters have been in contact through their blogs. They even link to each other.
For all their desire to showcase their works-in-progress to the world, Peter and the Forsters do practice some restraint to protect their privacy and themselves. Neither site divulges a significant amount of personal information, nor do they list their addresses or places of employment online.
When they first started, Aaron Forster's mother worried that someone would break into the couple's home and steal their dogs. That has not happened. But, as a testament to the bloggers' sense of community, when someone stole an Arkansas blogger's tools, the Forsters sent some of their old ones to help soften the loss.
The blogs are also a way to showcase for far-away friends and family the work, or sometimes minor victories and setbacks, that they have faced: a neighbor who dumps dirt in an alley, a bathroom that is nearing completion, a flooded basement.
For Peter, the blog is a way to keep himself honest about his ongoing renovation. If he writes in advance about a new project he plans to tackle over a weekend, he tries to follow through for his readers, who include his family in New York.
"If I say, 'I'm doing X this weekend,' then I usually end up doing it because if I don't, I'm sure someone will ask me about it," he said.
Aaron Forster's family in Ohio got a surprise when they recently visited the Nightmare on Elm Street. "What's funny is that his family hadn't looked in like three or four months," Amanda Forster said of her in-laws. "They were like, 'You're redoing your basement?' "
By the looks of the basement, the Forsters will have many more nightmares to write about on their Nightmare in months to come. Just don't expect too many do-it-yourself lessons to originate from the project. On this one, they might need a lot of help.
But that doesn't worry Amanda Forster. "There's a lot of support," she said.