Bread Baking (or Breaking)

I used to make bread all the time.  We hardly ever bought store bread.  I got really good at.  For the past few years, I've made bread occasionally and have had frustrating results.  For some reason, the yeast is causing me trouble, or at least the bread isn't rising well.  And our oven, well we are renting and if we owned this place the oven would be the first thing to be replaced.

Its frustrating.  I used to be so good at this and I can't get it to work.  I tried using store bought wheat instead of ground wheat.  I tried getting a different kind of yeast.  I bought a book all about baking bread, with copious information about leavening, in particular yeast.  But it isn't working.  I still get the same weird results with recipes that have worked well for me in the past.

I have some free time during the next couple of months, so I'm going to attempt to figure out if I'm just a hopeless failure at this for some reason, or if I'm just missing something critical.

I'm going to start out with some soda bread recipes.  These are bread recipes that use baking soda and baking powder as the leavening agent.  Using sodas is a lot less tricky than using yeast.  But, the bread doesn't have the same depth of flavor.

Then I'll try the old standby that I used to make all the time, being very particular about proofing the yeast for the right amount of time and measuring the ingredients precisely.

I'd also like to try to cook some bread in someone else's kitchen, but bread making is messy and time consuming so that might not work out for me.

I don't know where I will go from there, but I really miss those good loaves of bread that I used to make all the time.