The time I tried to tackle a reno all by myself

[caption id="attachment_1877" align="aligncenter" width="388"] The old bathroom--please ignore swiffer and other random items in the picture.[/caption]

When we first moved in to our home, the bathroom off the kitchen had a bi-fold door, and was this kind of blah purple colour.  The vanity was also quite tiny with no room for storage underneath.  In a house with no closets  I find it surprising that ANY design choices were undertaken in this home without "storage options" being at the top of the list.  This is primarily my bathroom as I get ready for work down here while Garret showers upstairs.  We tried to share the bathroom in the mornings but with us both leaving around the same time in the morning it just doesnt work.  I was trying to put contacts in with a steamed up mirror...makes makeup application tricky too. So I migrated to the downstairs bathroom.  The problems with this arrangement happen to be that the vanity is tiny and there is no room to store anything (as I have already just complained about)  My Mum and I were mulling around ways to make this bathroom better and we found a really awesome option at Ikea:

[caption id="attachment_1878" align="aligncenter" width="388"] fancy new sink[/caption]

We fell completely in love with this and the matching medicine cabinet and decided to have a bathroom reno party on the long weekend.  In our total naivete we thought that the only thing we would need G for would be to hang the cabinet and hook up the plumbing. Done and Done. For under $500 we could have a freshly redone bathroom/laundry room I was sold!  The furniture was picked up, Garret and I picked and paint colour and on the long weekend my Mum came down to paint.

I thought I would be doing more helping in the process but "Nana" was rather emphatic about Gus being exposed to paint fumes...so she painted and I just sort of mucked around and kept her company.  The new paint colour in the bathroom looked fantastic. (but I think after 3 coats she was ready to shoot G for claiming we didnt need primer...with that gross purple we DEFINITELY needed a primer coat!)  The time came for G to install the fixtures and we ran into a mild-ish problem.  The plumbing was done in such a way that it stuck way out of the wall....and wasn't going to work with the vanity that I picked.  There was also a brief "I hate Ikea" rant provided by him in the background as well based on the weird plumbing attachments that came with the vanity.

I could make this an extremely long drawn out story, but it just gets less and less interesting...so....A friend of his from work came by Fri night and Sat morning and helped him fix the plumbing. Which ended up being a really good thing because part of it was rotting out. SO when he has been complaining that "my" reno ended up requiring him to do some emergency plumbing I have been reminding him I am actually a lifesaver.  So yeah new plumbing, and yeah new fixtures and yeah our bathroom looks awesome.

[caption id="attachment_1879" align="aligncenter" width="388"] Oh look....he loves it[/caption]

Farewell to ugly purple and ugly vanity and hello to grumpy husband!  Now that it is finished he is loving me and my design choices again but he has said that we are not allowed to have any more Ikea in our house.  I think the next project I take on (or have my Mum and I take on) will require no help from him.

He is saying that since he helped with this he should get to take one item off his "before baby comes/G wants a new TV" honey do list.  Me thinks not. Anyone care to vote?

 

 

Long weekend Run Down

[caption id="attachment_1860" align="aligncenter" width="388"] Livin' Young and Wild and Free[/caption]

As thrilling as this likely seems....the above is (what I hope) a breakdown of this upcoming long weekend.  We have been out and about the past few weekends and have more events coming in the next few weeks. As a result our wee house is feeling a bit neglected...AND my early onset nesting nestyness is freaking out.

G and I tend to have a slight time management disagreement disorder.  He feels it is entirely possible to watch 5 movies, hang out with friends, go away over night and still somehow manage to accomplish 500 home related tasks.  I have learned that this is not even close to the truth and tends to leave me just annoyed drowning in a pile of laundry and grocery bags at the end of the weekend. And so my to do lists have been coming out to help keep us focused when we try to plan home things.  I get that a long weekend is kind of a downer weekend to be stuck at home working, but if I have to deal with the pile of lumber that has been taking up half my small hallway any longer, I will lose my ever loving mind.  (ed note: it has been there since Feb when we first discussed doing built ins for our room)  

In order to make these tasks fairly weighted between the two of us I am tackling the bathroom reno with the help of my Mum and her trusty favourite paint brush.  I figure over three days we can pretty easily get all the work done (I am thinking it will just take most of one day to paint and reassemble the new vanity etc in bathroom)  I will take some before pictures of the weird purple colour and impractical vanity that was left there from previous owners...I think that this point anything will be an improvement!

Wish me luck in us accomplishing all of this..or at least luck with me keeping G focused for three whole days hahaha

Early Onset Nesting

I have been feeling rather panicked lately about all the things that need to get done around the house.  We tend to talk in circles trying to decide what should be prioritized and what we can hold off on.  In a moment of trying to feel focused yesterday I made a list and sent to Garret at work.  Perhaps was a little overwhelming?  But holy smokes October is going to be here before we know it! Plus I have a sneaking suspicion we will have an even harder time focusing on house stuff once Junior arrives.

These are the main things I would really like to get done before Gus comes:

1. Trim on the door in downstairs bathroom


2. Paint downstairs bathroom


3. Swap out the sink downstairs bathroom


4.  Carpet the stairs


5. paint the railing and spindles (not a super priority)


6.  Backsplash in kitchen (we could just paint it before we decide to do something else...then it looks pretty and less boring)


7.  Builtins in bedroom


8. Hanging all the frames on the wall in our room


9.  Getting bathtub reglazed


10.  Fence


11. Garden maintenance


12. Powerwash/sand/paint front porch..lighting if we are feeling crazy?


13. New storm doors for kitchen door and front door


14.  Nursery will likely just involve hanging a few shelves and maybe some art over the crib? Nothing dramatic and I already like the paint colour in there. Oh and some sort of closet organization system.


15. ok I am done for now.

His response was along the lines of: "we will make a plan of attack later...when I am not at work...on a Monday morning"  Some of the heavy lifting construction jobs I will have to bow out of for now, but if we start doing some things before I am 30lbs heavier and it is 30 degrees hotter out I think we have a good chance of getting things completed.  I have roped my darling Mum into coming for a day or two next weekend to help me get the downstairs bathroom done (hurray)  I feel if we pick certain jobs and pick when we can work on them stuff will get done.  It is that whole "oh at some point we should do this" attitude that we seem to thrive on which I fear will lead to me bringing Gus home to a house that continues to look like a construction site.  Every new mothers dream, am I right?!

Crafting for Christmas

The hat project is going pretty well. I should be done tomorrow and it will have taken me a week. (Minus the weekend as I didn't work it) My crafts for Christmas project is going pretty well so far. My goal is to do two hats and a scarf before Christmas(I like how I've increased my goal!) ...not that they will necessarily be gifts but it's good to have a time goal in mind. Plus lunch breaks get boring some days so now I have a fun project! I've decided to put the quilting on hold until I am at my mums for Christmas...more room for my sewing machine!

Purple Teeth and no more Closet

Saturday we went down to Niagara to celebrate some 30th birthdays.  Excellent time!  The only downside to visiting many wineries in one afternoon is that it is hard to stay awake past supper.

[caption id="attachment_978" align="aligncenter" width="388"] Slighting boozy smiles with Ashley on the bus[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_979" align="aligncenter" width="388"] My prince Charming and his wine filled glass slipper[/caption]

We went to 6 wineries and had yummy tastings at each one.  G and I bought a few bottles to put in our wine cellar/basement...we laugh because we always have lofty plans of having a bit of a collection, but then the wine mood hits and we break into our stash and that is the end of that.  We managed to rally and make it out for supper, but by the time the gang was heading out to the bar we were both so full of food ready for bed. The Walsh's are a fan of sleep!  Sunday morning we had breakfast with the gang and headed back home to do some work on the house.

Kevin had stayed over on Saturday and finished laying the flooring down in our bedroom.  One step closer to a finished space!  We had also discussed making the linen closet a bit smaller to allow for a bigger nook in our walk in closet.  So we came home to:

[caption id="attachment_980" align="aligncenter" width="388"] a wee doorway for small dogs and house elves to enter our closet[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_981" align="aligncenter" width="388"] G demonstrating the door way[/caption]

Kevin had started cutting it out so he could put flooring all the way through. Glorious, Glorious flooring! Last night G cut out the rest of the wall.  We will be moving the wall back a foot, and then I think building some sort of shelving in the closet for...you guessed it! More storage!  We also spent some quality time at Rona trying to pick out a colour for our bedroom. Originally the plan was white, but then we noticed that there are approximately 200 different shades of white (a less exciting version of 50 shades of Grey perhaps?) The choice ended up being "Risotto" which is a lightly more cream/taupe colour.  As of late we have been pretty pumped with our spur of the moment paint choices so I am hoping that this also works out so well.  Garret has one of his flex days today so he is at home working today...very excited to see what I get to come home to! I love having such a handy hubby. (*side note, first time I have said hubby HA)

Planning the next step

While Garret is worrying about how our old uneven floor is going to cause problems for installing the new floor....I am already starting to think about what we can do next.  As I have complained about countless times before, we have no storage space in our house.  In fact we have a really weird teensy walk in closet in our room and a linen closet in the hall way and that is it.  Storage space is scarce n our parts and we have been trying to think of some creative solutions that also look nice.  My mum came across the below two images which I think would be perfect in some combination in our bedroom

[caption id="attachment_953" align="aligncenter" width="388"] Snazzy and would match our existing Ikea bedframe[/caption]

sourced from here

And this one which I also really like:

[caption id="attachment_954" align="aligncenter" width="388"] And this I really like because we could display things (nicely and neatly) on the shelves and have other stuff like jewellery, socks, various other needing storage items in the drawers.[/caption]

Sourced from here.

The tricky part with our bedroom is:

1) Our bedroom is pretty small so the shelving on either side wouldn't be able to be too wide

2) The ceiling in our bedroom is slanted (there is no attic over our bedroom so the ceiling sort of follows the pitch of the roof)  Therefore we don't have a ton of height to work with.

So I think we will end up having to fiddle with a few things to get it to work.  G wants to build something himself, but I am trying to convince him that we should start with an Ikea shell and go from there.  There are just so many projects that require our attention around the house that the ones where we can cheat and get it done in an afternoon? I'm all for those.  Plus I have heard that building Ikea furniture together is a really good marital test so hey why not?!

It gets worse before it gets better

At least this is what I keep telling myself. (and getting Garret to reassure me with)  Part of our newlywed motivational push had to do with getting stuff done around the house.  We are pretty rejuvenated; riding on the post wedding/honeymoon high, so we have started really  moving forward with all things homey.  Garret fixed the ceiling and finished taping/drywalling/sanding the area in the living room (yay) and we also finally chose and brought home hardwood flooring for upstairs. My father in law is coming over later this week and our project for the rest of the week and weekend is getting our floor installed and finished.  For those of you who haven't been to casa de Walsh, the upstairs is pretty tiny.  A small hallway, two smallish bedrooms and the only closet in the house.  The plus side is that we don't have a lot of space we need to put flooring in, but the down side is we have no shuffle room to put our stuff as we do the floors. So the downstairs of our house looks like the upstairs exploded all over it.  Last night while I made some accidently incredibly spicy soup for dinner, G ripped out a weird shelving unit that the former owners had built into the wall. That has been on the to-do list for over a year, and while it didn't really take up too much space in the hall way, it really looks nice to have it gone.

Tonight we are going to move our dressers, bedside tables etc. downstairs creating a sort of furnishings gauntlet one must walk through to get from the front door to the kitchen. (If you make it in one piece your reward is dinner!) It will be so worthwhile in the end, but thus far has only created frustration as it has lead Garret to once more notice what a book hoarder he married.(He usually doesn't notice the stacks I have on the floor on my side of our bed)  Wish us luck as we embark on this task because neither of us tends to function well when our house/life is really chaotic so this could be an interesting weekend!

Fall To-Dos

It seems that my little house blog took a serious turn for wedding rambling for a while there...now that that is over let me enthral you with our upcoming home reno plans:

Since we took such a time out on the house to focus on summer plans, wedding planning and general non house related life stuff, our home to do plans over the next few months are extensive!  We are both big socializers and seem to always have weekend plans, so we decided to make more time during the week to at least push things forward a little. We can easily allot a few hours after work to painting and other house fixing related tasks. We are also going to try to not book both weekend days with plans for a while, so we have some more time to try to accomplish things.  The past year and a bit in the house has taught us one lesson: everything takes twice as long as you think it will!

We finished our dining room a few months ago (except for the lighting) and we take so much satisfaction out of how nice that room looks.  I want that feeling everywhere else in our home.  So....this weekend we are planning to finish painting the living room ceiling and the walls where we removed the crown moulding (Garret has been skim coating and sanding this week so we should be good to go)  He is DYING to start  the brickwork on the one wall, so that might get kicked off as well.  Once the living room is done we are going to (and not necessarily in this order):

1. Put the trim up on the other side of the door in the downstairs washroom

2. Backsplash in the kitchen. We have been putting WAY too much thought into it, we just need to pick something and go with it.

3. Fix the hole in the ceiling in the kitchen that was cut to change out the wiring.  (it is so small that we keep forgetting it's there, but it would be nice to have that DONE)

4. Paint the staircase and railing.  The top banister requires some serious sanding though, it would appear the previous owner had a beaver who cut his baby teeth on the fop railing.

5. Put a runner down the stairs

6. New light fixture and fix ceiling in entrance hall (maybe this is two separate items?!)

7. Finish painting our room and guest room--we have colours chosen already we just need to get at it

8. Install the new hardwood flooring we bought upstairs (I will be sucking up to my Father in Law tonight to see when he can come help! )

9. Install three new doors upstairs (two bedrooms and the bathroom)  The existing doors are AWFUL.  The guest bedroom door gets stuck all the time, the gap in the bathroom door would be perfect for a peeping tom, and our bedroom door doesn't even close!

There are a billion and one other items on our list, but I feel like this is hefty enough to keep us going for the fall/winter.  I also need to throw in: organize basement and build closet type fake built ins around our bed, but don't let me get ahead of myself! One of my girlfriends might be coming to live with us for a few weeks in October so I feel like getting the guest room sorted out might be the top of our priority list.. I will keep you posted on how things go.

Shower Shuffle

We can't quite pinpoint when this occurred, but sometime in the past month or two something funky has been happening with our shower.  No matter what you set the water temperature to be at it shifts quickly between making ice cubes and shooting lava at you.  G and I are often of the mindset that "hummm....maybe if we ignore this issue it will just remedy itself" Especially when we call our hot water on demand supplier and they inform us that it is a $150 service call which may or may not fix the problem.  (urgh) So in our new found frugalness we have just begun to learn how to do the shower shuffle:

1. Turn shower to temp you want, get naked and be ready to leap in at a moments notice

2. Temp where you want it? Hop in and turn shower head to face the wall--soak yourself as fast as possible

3. As it begins to turn to one crazy extreme or the other,  stand at back of shower so you just get mist of it and lather up hair and body

4. When you sense it heading back to more regular temperature,  hop back in and rinse as if your life depends on it

5. Repeat steps 3-4 as needed...a few too many times if I am shaving my legs.

It has been working nicely except it has been so super hot the past few days that trying to have a cool shower before bed involves a lot of waiting through hot water cycles but it works...for now.  How long can we live like this I wonder?  It sort of reminded me of that early 90's  hot water PSA featuring Tweety Bird "hot water can burn in wess than thwee seconds"  Anyone else remember that?

Buck and Doe aka now it's 93 days to gooooo

See what I did there? A little rhyming action? Cheesy, but it's good right? aaaand moving on...Last Saturday night we had our buck and doe/ Jack and Jill.  For everyone who isn't from a small town let me explain.  We pretty much had a dance party that acted as a fundraiser for our wedding.  I have been to roughly 500 of them in my lifetime and they are always so much fun! We have been looking forward to this for such a long time I can't believe that it has gone by already.  It was such an amazing night, and felt so good to be surrounded by friends and family drinking, dancing and listening to great live music (our friend's band 'Hewgie and the Dustjackets') We were up until 4:30am--the evening culminated with an impromptu hot tub party at my Mum's place. Thusly Garret and I have been haggard creatures all week. In fact it took until today for me to feel some sense of myself again. I guess that is a sign of getting old? What a great great night

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Happy Blogaversary

[caption id="attachment_736" align="aligncenter" width="300"] It's your special day lil Blog[/caption]

A year ago today I started writing notes about our live in our new house!  One of my favourite sayings is "The days are long, but the years are short"  I feel like so much has happened in the past year, but at the same time so many things have stayed the same.  I can still vividly remember our excitement with the arrival of our first summer in our new home.  It still feels so new.  I was reflecting on how we thought about things last year and now want to laugh at us.  New home owners can be so naive and I can say that about myself.  We thought that by this time we would have done so much work on our little house, but I think neither Garret nor myself really knew how much time and money is involved with home renos!  We have done a lot of the technical stuff (changing out the plumbing and the wiring) which isn't something you notice, but is important!  Now we have so many of the "pretty" jobs we want to start tackling....the fun part!

Things I have learned this past year:

1. Everything (including changing a lightbulb) is going to take you roughly 3times longer than you think--budget your time accordingly

2. Everything costs more money than you think it will..budget your money accordingly

3.  Mosquitoes are not just found up at the cottage. Apparently Barrie backyards suffice

4. Our house is never as clean as when we are about to have a party. Which makes no sense because a bunch of people in the house inevitably = a mess

5.  Chalkboard paint may be trendy but it is a lot of fun

6. Having a designated spider killer is good

7.  None of our rooms are square thanks to the lack of rulers in 1908....

8. When painting Garret is way better at cutting in

9.  Sometimes, when picking a paint colour you just have to go with it and hope for the best. you can repaint if you hate it, and those little wee sample pots of colour really add up over time

10. Garret and I have less in common when it comes to decor and landscaping ideas than we had originally thought

11. Weeds grow MUCH faster than the pretty flowers I planted

12. Taking care of a giant back yard is less idyllic than I had originally thought

13. Good neighbours are a key to a happy life

14. Creepy basements take some getting used to, but it is possible to sleep alone in a house while G is away overnight. (this was a biggie ha)

15.  I would never ever go back to my little Toronto apartment even if you paid me

Coming up on the To Do list

We have a mega to do list which I'm not going to get into tonight. But one of the things near the top for me is lighting. We inherited some really ugly wall sconces with this house. Now that we are finally getting around to painting and getting our living room in order I really want to get our lighting a little more funky. Harrison is on the case and hunting for something eclectic we can replace these with:

Monogrammed Decor

My mum bought us these adorable hooks when we bought the house. I've been trying to think of where to put them! We took down the really ugly coat rack when Garret painted on the weekend and I was thinking these could replace it!

Spackle

We finally decided on paint for our front hall yay! Garret spent some quality time this weekend spackling and sanding our walls so that they will have a few
less grooves when the new paint goes on. Next up...paint colours for our room, guest bedroom and downstairs bathroom!

ecoEnergy Retrofit

I recently found out that the ecoENERGY grants had been extended (weeeee)! Something G and I have discovered as the days are getting colder, it's that our home is not great when it comes to heat loss.  Step one was getting our furnace looked at, but now step two will be having one of the energy auditors come and let us know ways in which we can make the house  more efficient.  Check here for details  I'm not sure how much we would qualify for, but based on how badly we don't want to get out of our warm bed in the morning, I think anything might help.  Perhaps we can just super insulate our bedroom so that could make our mornings less frost bitten!  It's my understanding that they give you a list of ways to make the house more energy efficient, and then you can get some money back based on the changes you make.....This is coming at a good time as I am starting to get a bit nervous what our gas bill is going to look like in the coming months....*gulp

Weekend Review

I'm extremely proud of our progress this weekend! We incorporated the correct ratio of work to fun for Sat and Sunday so it worked out!
We:

*Fought a losing battle against the leaves in the back and side yard. We were out there for a few hours, filled up 4 bags and then G mulched a pile. But then this morning I noticed a bunch more had fallen! Urgh...

*switched the light in the kitchen and dining room to dimmers...glorious mood lighting for cooking. I love it

*we took turns yesterday sanding the storm doors and I'm excited to say they are finally (almost) done. We just need to stain 'em and hang 'em back up and we are in business. Next time I'm going to convince G we should just buy doors cause this was a project I HATED. Once they are hung up I'll post a pic.

*we went to the Brick and bought a new mattress...it is like sleeping in heaven (or somewhere else heavenly) we've had an ikea mattress for the past 4 years and while G can easily sleep on a rock, or sitting up etc, my sleeping tastes are a bit more discerning so I'm extremely excited

We also caught up on laundry and made some meals for the week. I love the sense of accomplishment I get when it's Sunday night and i feel like we are ready to face the week ahead! What did everyone get up to this weekend?

Pinterest Challenge!

Much like Sherry of Young House Love, I spend a lot of time pinning things on Pinterest and don't get around to making anything I note.  Sherry and some other lovely blog ladies have made a pin challenge where they all commit to make something that they had pinned.  I have done one so far that  I find to be blog worthy.  I pinned this several months ago in anticipation of my Mum's 60th birthday and wanting to do something special for decoration.

[caption id="attachment_283" align="aligncenter" width="240" caption="Happy Birthday Stranger"][/caption]

I LOVED this image and thought it was a really creative way to showcase a bunch of photos of the birthday boy or girl.  I showed this to my friend Natalie who helped me make it even better! (and 10 years older)

[caption id="attachment_284" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Happy Birthday Mum"][/caption]

As per usual I didn't take a picture at the height of the decor (picture hot pink balloons and streamers) but I have to say that I was thrilled at how it turned out.  It definitely makes me want to make more of an effort to actually attempt some of these things I want to try!