House in Progress Diary

A trip to the Restoration and Renovation Expo

Today we went to the Restoration & Renovation Expo at Chicago's Navy Pier.

Even though it's a conference intended for architects and contractors, we found it pretty useful as homeowners, too. (It's in Boston in 2004 for those of you in that neck of the woods.) It was nice to make quick work of our questions in just one afternoon, and we had plenty of access to vendors since traffic was a bit light on the afternoon of the last day of the conference.

A great thing about our new place is that it is a quick trip downtown via the El. In just 30 minutes, we were enjoying a beautiful day on the Lake Michigan waterfront.

After a stroll along the pier, we headed in to register. A few minutes later, we'd registered and "House in Progress" was officially at the show.

What we found was a bit of everything. We got good information on:

• Mini-duct AC systems (we've intended to learn about Space Pak and Unico for awhile now.)
  
• Window alternatives to replace the glass block in our ff bathroom (The Andersen guys were nice.)
  
• Lots of neat reproduction and vintage hardware distributors (like Rejuvenation Hardware)
  

So the surprise of the day? While we certainly learned alot, we never would have thought that we would have been recognized because of this site! But sure enough, at two vendor booths when we walked up they looked at our badges and said "Hey, the House in Progress people!" Weird!

Anyway, we'll be gathering bids on mini-duct AC systems in the next few months, so we'll let you know how that pans out. In the meantime, it was just nice to get out of the house and enjoy the last weekend of summer!

Posted by aaron on September 20, 2003 at 8:51 PM