If you forgot to do these fall chores to button up your house for winter, don’t sweat it. My spring list for This Old House is coming soon.

“Wallpaper is like a shot of Botox for a tired-looking room. Sure, paint will perk it up, but paper adds more than just color; it gives walls character, dimension, and pattern.” That’s how my “All About Wallpaper” piece in this month’s This Old House starts out. Funny thing is, after writing this piece, I realized two things. One, as someone who swoons over luscious papers by the likes of William Morris,  Florence Broadhurst, and Jill Malek, I suffer from the classic paradox of choice when it comes to picking out just the right wallpaper. Two, with all do respect for the new “strippable” papers, paperhanging is much harder than it looks and best left to the pros, at least in my old house.

Here’s how to make my day: Ask me to write 10,000 words about a subject I’m constantly researching for pleasure anyway. At the beginning of the summer,  HGTV called and did just that. My opus on planning a landscape is all over their new HGTV Remodels website. Now I’m just itching to rip apart my yard!

Two stories I just did for HGTV’s latest website, HGTVRemodels, made me want to convert to solar more than ever. Up till now, our 1890 Victorian energy hog has not been suitable for conventional solar installations — wrong orientation, steep slope, and little open roof space. But there are a couple of new aesthetically pleasing solar products, including solar shingles, that might make it possible one day, when our slate roof finally gives out. And this story on homeowners who’ve gone solar includes my parents’ neighbors Eric Shen and Betty Carteret, who besides being early adopters of solar technology, have an amazing rain-harvesting system for their Puget Sound garden.

In a case of the cobbler’s kids go shoeless, here’s a recent slideshow on The Biggest Threats to a Healthy Home that I wrote for HGTVPro.com. When I first saw the art they chose for the “water intrusion” blurb, I thought, “Whoa, when did HGTV shoot my house?”  Case in point: our “water closet” shown at left.