TGIF

While our weekends are busy and now filled with what seems like an endless rotation of hockey games, they're a welcome reprieve from the morning school run. No matter how organized I try to be, mornings always end with me at the door shrieking for the boys to get.your.shoes.on. Well, almost always.

This morning the hold up was

total engrossment in The Hunger Games.

How stinking cute is that?

Too bad I still had to shriek at him.

In case you were wondering

In case you were wondering why all of the pictures I keep showing are close ups of very specific areas of the house.....

This is why.

Much of the house is still a disaster area. Well, disaster may be a bit of an exaggeration, but messy construction zone isn't far off. There are tools and ladders and cans of paint scattered everywhere. Closet doors with wet paint on them taking up space on the bathroom floor. Hand soap residing next to the caulking gun and toothbrushes next to screwdrivers.

 There are many areas where paint touch-ups need to be done. 

And closets finished.

And this is just the bathroom. It's overwhelming when I stop to think about the house as a whole, but satisfying to complete each small area.

But isn't my new vanity gorgeous?!?! Even covered in tools.

New kitchen shelves

When we decided to do the big reno, I figured it was a good time to buy the stove that I’ve been lusting after for years. My sister got one first, and I would eye it jealously very time I visited her. It’s a BlueStar six burner gas range. And it’s beautiful. Since the new stove is 36” wide and my old stove was only 30” we had to do some re-jigging of the cabinetry. The old stove was flanked by two 30” uppers and the fridge was against the back wall. It's that ugly black box in the corner there.

With the addition of the upstairs bathroom, we had to create a bulkhead along the top of the upper cabinets, and run a new plumbing stack down in the corner where the fridge used to be. Between this and the new stove, I was worried that we were going to have a tough time with the cabinets, as they were custom made for us 11 years ago. I figured that it would be impossible to match the colour on them. And I really didn’t want to change them.

Thankfully, the sizes of the cabinets worked out perfectly. I searched endlessly, and finally found a Samsung fridge that has French doors, is counter depth, and is only 33” wide. This allowed us to use the old gables and upper to surround the fridge. The contractors had to cut down the upper cabinet about 1.5” as the new fridge is a little taller than the old one.

The next problem was the space between the fridge and the stove. Luckily it was 15” wide, so we cut down the original 30” wide upper and used a single door on it. I ran out to Ikea and picked up a new 15” box for the lower and we used one of the doors from the upper above the stove, and one of the drawer faces from the cabinet we removed. That was our contractor Martin's genius idea.

 

The final hurdle was the space left between the fridge and the original rear wall of the house.

We had a bookshelf built to fill this space, and I painted it the same semi-gloss white as the trim.It looks blindingly white and shiny in the picture, but that's because of the flash. It looks really nice in real life.

The cubbies are three different sizes. The largest one on the bottom is tall enough to fit my original Canadian Living cookbook. I use it all the time, so it was important for it to be in the kitchen. When we were discussing the size of the shelves I had to scurry up to find the cookbook so that we could measure it’s height. I should write to Canadian Living and let them know I designed a bookshelf around their cookbook. Maybe I can win a biggest fan prize or something.

I lugged down all of my favourite cookbooks that I use on a regular basis from their storage place in our bedroom,

pulled out a bunch of pretty kitchen stuff from the cupboards and storage boxes and started arranging the shelves.

And there you have it.

It’s so nice to have all of this extra and easily accessible storage in the kitchen. I can keep a small number of regularly used books from my shamefully large cookbook collection here (I love to read about food almost as much as I love to eat it).

I was worried about losing the two large pot drawers that I kept all of my tupperware in, but I gained some cabinet space that used to be taken up by my cookbooks with this set of shelves. I also ruthlessly purged my storage containers and winnowed it down to one drawer, which I now store to the right of the stove, right below my pots and pans.

Every few days I make a little more progress unpacking. Slow, but steady! 

The inaugural run of the tub

It wasn't me.

I was hoping to make it in first, but C. beat me to it. He was in there floating around and drinking his Slurpee for over an hour. Over an hour of peace and quiet for me - so well worth the sacrifice of not being first.

I was the first to use the new shower this morning, though. It was awesome. And the under floor heating - heavenly.

The kitchen sink...

Despite my high hopes and enthusiasm earlier this week, I haven’t made much progress in the bathroom. I just can’t seem to bring myself to paint. Maybe this evening I’ll put on a movie on Netflix and lock myself in there until it’s done.

I did manage to hang some pictures on the wall in the kitchen. At least I have one small corner of the house back in shape! Here’s a picture of the kitchen part-way through the reno. Note the tiny little useless window above the sink. I couldn’t open it without a climbing on a chair because of the angle of the countertop by the sink.

We forgot to include the larger window in the original building permit, and almost didn’t bother with it. Boy, am I ever glad that we did! Compare the picture above with how it looks now

Not only does it let in a tonne of light as it faces south, I can also now look out of it when I’m doing dishes. I cannot believe that I lived the last 12 years without it! 

We also replaced the kitchen faucet. It wasn’t in the plans, but it seems that it got knocked around during the reno and was leaking like crazy into the cupboard below. So we trundled up to Ginger’s and bought this amazing new one. It’s their Soho 33 line. We got taps from the same line for our upstairs bathroom as well.

I love how high above the counter it is – I can easily fill really tall pots. And the bell-shaped part is a pull-out spray nozzle; pretty and functional. The bowl holding the fruit behind the tap is the first item I ever purchased at auction over a decade ago.

I waffled between pictures or a large mirror over the sink. I was thinking that the mirror would reflect light from the window back into the room. But I had pictures on hand, so I decided to put them up and see how I liked it.

I don’t like the Monet/Renoir little poster things in the outer upper frames (they were cheap little things that I have from when I was an undergrad), but I’m happy with the rest of the grouping. Several of the pictures are special to us. The spoon was A.’s grandmother’s. She used it every day for mixing, and apparently stirred so vigorously that she wore away part of the bowl.

And this old picture came from my great aunt JoJo. I’ve had it since I was a young teen – she gave it to me the year before she died.

We picked up the antique seed packets on our very first trip to Saxton’s River, Vermont; for the FASEB Viral Assembly Meeting of course. Unfortunately the store that we bought it in has gone out of business. I checked when we were there in June. It’s too bad as they had a lot of beautiful antique maps, prints, and other interesting art. 

All in all, I'm happy with how it turned out. But now I'm on the prowl for something to replace the two little art prints in the top row. Maybe some original kid art? 

Adiós contractors!

The shower glass was installed in the second floor bathroom yesterday, and the hole in the wall of the furnace room was repaired. Which is a huge relief, as it was big enough to let a raccoon or a skunk squeeze in. And being fall, that’s a distinct possibility. Especially since there’s a whole family of raccoons inhabiting the roof of the old witch’s house next door that watch us through the skylights in our back room. Yes, it’s a little creepy.

These were the last two jobs to be done by the contractors. It’s going to be kind of strange to not see the crew every morning on our way out to work. And I might miss them just a little. I’ll definitely miss the excitement of coming home to something new every day.

So now we’re on our own with the bottomless list of stuff that needs to be done. I can’t decide if I should work from the top of the house down, from the basement up, or try to get the main floor in shape and then move out from there. Or maybe I should try to get all the dusty stuff done and then clean. I’m sooooo tired of the endless dust.

I think that maybe I’ll tackle the second floor bathroom first as I don’t really want to move our stuff up from the basement bathroom until it’s all painted and cleaned. We painted the walls a pale grey (Marilyn's Dress from Benjamin Moore) before the fixtures were installed, but some things had to be moved (like the vanity lights) and installing the toilet seemed to take some chunks out of the wall. So there’s a bunch of drywall patching that needs to be touched up. And there’s still a fair amount of trim that needs to be painted. Some of it has one coat already, but the doors are only primed. Hopefully I can get that done over the next few evenings.

This weekend I’m going to tackle the linen closet. I’m looking forward to getting all of our linens unpacked from the Rubbermaid containers and various other places that they’ve been shoved during the reno. I have to build some shelves and then they’ll need to be painted as well. It feels like the painting will never end.

I’ve been holding off on the inaugural run of this beauty:

I think that this weekend I’ll clean her out, bust out a glass of wine and a good book and hide from the boys relax in there for an hour or two. Or as long as the hot water lasts – that thing is huge!

And I’m keeping my fingers crossed that I don’t end up on the kitchen floor. Hopefully all that tearing down of the kitchen ceiling and ripping up the second story floor pays off and the new joists hold up. Here's a shot taken during the reno that shows how woefully under-supported the old floor was - and how bowed down the old (darker) joists were.

 

Truthfully, I’m still a little nervous about how much the full tub in the middle of that unsupported span, with me in it, will weigh. Wish me luck! 

And the saga of the door continues...

We arrived home on Saturday night, exhausted, after closing the cottage and driving three hours back to the city. I was really looking forward to the take-out jerk chicken that we picked up on our way, a glass of wine, and maybe a movie after we got the kids to bed. We arrived home to find the new handle on the front door. Progress! Great!

The only problem was that we had no key. Seriously. We did have a key to the sliding door in the back, but the little extra deadbolt thingy was engaged. You know, to keep people out. On the bright side, we now know that no matter how much you heave and jiggle, that lock ain't opening.

And to add insult to injury, the lock box (to which we didn't know the combo) was hanging right there.

I was cursing myself for not having asked the contractors what the combo was just in case I forgot my keys one day. Oh, and I was really cursing the contractors for changing the lock after we left on Friday (of the long weekend), and forgetting that we might want to get into our own house before Tuesday morning.

Thankfully our neighbours were home and took us in out of the dark and cold. We called both of the contractors, but naturally, being the long weekend, neither of them answered their phones. We left cranky messages and decided to head up to my brother's place in Muskoka then, instead of Sunday morning.

It's like this door is cursed. It almost makes me wish for our trusty old original door back. Even with all of its problems.

Thankfully, the rest of the weekend was filled with beautiful scenery, good food, family, and lots of fun.