"Our weekend was one death-match after another," Ahlen wrote his blogosphere friends this week - a virtual "Carnival of Pain." Of his nemesis, he wrote, "I had to fight dirty ... I threw sand in its eye, knee-capped it with a pipe, and stabbed it in the face."

Yes, Ahlen's nemesis is merely his stubborn old house near Atkins, Ark., a Queen Anne Victorian he's dubbed "The Devil Queen" - or on tough days, "the house of pure evil." And he's just one of hundreds of "housebloggers" who swap tales of stripping paint, restoring windows, installing fixtures, varnishing, scraping, caulking, sawing, hammering, shaving and drilling.

As with all worlds brought together by the Internet, it doesn't matter where you are. You can be at your villa in Morocco, commenting on the stain a fellow blogger has chosen for his floor boards in Wisconsin. You can be in your tiny studio in New York City, getting advice from Australia about the backsplash in your kitchen.

And the best thing? "Nobody thinks you're crazy," says Jeannie Olson, author of the "House in Progress" blog and editor of a whole community of blogs. When you buy a run-down house that needs years of renovation, Olson says, "people you know think you're completely insane. You lose your social life." But in the blogosphere, you have a home.

And friendship - virtual, maybe, but also quite real. When Olson and her husband, Aaron, had their first child eight months ago, they posted a delivery-room video of newborn Grace. It was only natural, since readers were well acquainted with their first "baby" - their house in the Albany Park section of Chicago.

Housebloggers point to Bill Chapman as the pioneer. Chapman made his first online journal entry in 1999 - "no one was using the word ‘blog' yet" - the day he and his wife closed on Enon Hall, a Dutch colonial on four acres in Lancaster County, Va., that was deeded to an ancestor of Chapman's in 1762.

Seven years of renovation later, Chapman's journal on EnonHall.com gets 800 unique visits a day; his forum has 170 registered users. "We get e-mails from people saying, ‘You're doing something we've always dreamed of doing,' " Chapman says.

He, too, gets comfort at tough times from his virtual family. When Tropical Storm Ernesto hit Virginia this month, it took its toll on the house. Demoralized, Chapman, 43, didn't post an entry for a while. Readers expressed concern: "Hey - hope you didn't fall off the scaffold!" It was enough to lift Chapman's spirits and get him back online.

You don't need four acres - or even a mortgage - to have a popular houseblog. New Yorker Alex Bandon has about 550 square feet - pretty typical for a one-bedroom rental in the city. But her blog, "The Shelter Life," has had 20,000 visitors since she began it this summer, she says.

Bandon, 39, says it's hard to document whether interest in home improvement has increased, or whether it's just that, as in so many areas, people have found each other on the Web. But it would seem the recent residential real estate boom - now cooling from its record-setting pace - has added to the number of people interested in fixing up their homes.

There are now 358 blogs on Houseblogs.net . Among them: Bloggers from Australia, Estonia, France and even Morocco, where an American family is designing and building a guest house in Marrakesh.

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