From my very first home page somewhere in 1994 to my current one (that is, until yesterday) I always did every aspect of design myself. My home was always handcrafted.
Last big update I did in year 2006. Then I made .NET based solution that enabled me to ease my way into updating content. Every year from then I started new design and then abandoned it because lack of time.
In meantime I started writing blog on blogger.com and using it's infrastructure and I was annoyed. Part was because blogger.com lacks some basic functionality and part was because I could not change anything in it's code.
Next year will be different. I finally got off my ass and did some WordPress investigations. Before I knew it, WordPress was already running on my test domain and it took only one day for it to move to my main domain. In next few days I will also migrate my blog.
It was an impulse decision to do this so do expect some down time while I get to know the platform.