Blog about your remodel? It's all good

When John Park (shown here with daughter Bea) did an addition to his Burbank home, he created a blog, Park Haus Addition, to share his adventure with the world. We wanted to know his motivation:

Why did you decide to blog about your addition?

One, we wanted to share our designs with friends and family. Two was to document the process and prove to ourselves that we actually lived through this chaos. Three, it actually became a good way to collaborate on design with our architect. Better than email, really, since it was easy to refer to.

What have been the greatest one or two benefits of your blog?

A big benefit of the blog has been tens of dollars in Google Ad revenue! Just kidding. I think one benefit has been to make the whole thing public. Usually this sort of thing is private and hidden away. It's between you and your contractor. You've got no one to vent to, and they've got no one to answer to. I think that Los Angeles is too big for contractors to really worry about negative word-of-mouth. But the scope of blogging changes that. With hundreds of people reading your posts every day there has to be some impact on how everyone involved behaves.

What has been the biggest downside to doing the blog? None.

What advice would you give to others who might want to blog about their remodel?

Anyone who remodels and wants to blog about it should take loads of pictures, even on days you don't feel like it. Some stages come and go quickly, and you don't want to miss those moments. I saw some advice posted by Mark Frauenfelder on Boing Boing to always include a photo with your blog posts. Everyone loves to see the progress. In fact, I wish I'd posted more photos per post than I did.

Another interesting bit of blog advice (that I didn't follow) is to make it anonymous. Since we knew that our friends, family, and architect were reading the blog I'm sure we subconsciously edited our writing. With anonymity we would have probably written differently, in ways that readers would likely find more interesting.