Erika Howsare has been a C-VILLE contributor since 2002. Her first nonfiction book is The Age of Deer: Trouble and Kinship with Our Wild Neighbors (2024), and she hosted a podcast miniseries called “If You See a Deer.” She teaches writing locally.
It’s not easy to nearly double the square footage of a house without bulking up its street profile. But that’s just what happened at Mike and Karen Ball’s North Downtown […]
When Justin Rood went house-hunting in Charlottesville, he looked really hard. Many dozens of properties into his search, he still hadn’t found just the right place—but not because he was […]
If your house sits on a small city lot, it may seem as though there’s little room to expand. After all, city regulations limit how much of your lot may […]
There are a few iconic local retailers in Charlottesville, and Amy Gardner’s store, Scarpa, is one of them. The women’s boutique—which started out selling shoes nearly 23 years ago and […]
When Bonnie Bond bought her condo in the Lewis and Clark Building downtown in 2012, she faced an unusual situation. Not only was the two-bedroom unit due for routine updates—the […]
This is a full circle kind of story. A couple of years ago, on this very page, we got some advice from local contractor Troy Yancey about renovating an Earlysville […]
Glenn Robertson, of Smith & Robertson, cast his remodeler’s eye on a Free Union two-story. Here are his ideas for bringing it up to date. 5315 Free Union Rd. $279,000 […]
Back in the winter of 2012, the Mayan calendar supposedly predicted the end of the world. That didn’t happen, but big changes were about to come to one little farmhouse […]
It was a familiar Charlottesville story. The house, a 1960s ranch, boasted a great location near Downtown, but its outdated floor plan needed to be modernized. “It was a lot […]
For some folks, “downsizing” means moving from a house to a condo. Many empty-nesters relish letting go of maintenance and other work associated with the family home—in other words, simplifying. […]