North Glenora Reno

Our new bed is in place, as is Finley’s new bed as well. I am writing this from the “chair that started it all.” So, I’m done, right?

Who cares that the windows aren’t all stained yet, or that we have no baseboard or window trim, or that the bathroom is little more than a beautifully lit cavern? I am done. Don’t tell R, he will run over here to my beautiful chair and dump me right out of it.

Okay, so I’m not done, despite my deep desire for it to be so. We still have a whole lot of work to complete around here (as mentioned above).

However, going back to my happy place, these are the things that have happened over the last week and a bit. The painting of the eating area, the closet, our bedroom and the bathroom are all done. The flooring for the bedroom and closet, R did last weekend. It is beautiful and it was amazing how quickly that that made our new room seem a part of the rest of the house. The closet organizers are complete and one of us (guess who?) got nearly all of her clothes in there as soon as possible. The closet too, is amazing. It is so much wider and brighter than I ever thought possible.

The electrician came back yesterday and connected all of the light fixtures that we installed this week to the circuit box, so not only do we have light fixtures, as you saw the beginning of last week, but we now also have light! This is an amazing feat. The safety factor around has gone up ten fold both inside and outside the house. There are now fixtures in the bathroom (aka beautifully lit cavern), and the fixture in the entry of our room is spectacular! I am not overstating.

Today, we prep the windows for R to stain while I am out of town (wow, I dodged a bullet on that one, eh?) and R is doing some fancy switches and plug-in so that our house controls itself.

Things around here are really starting to come together! Since the end of October, the drywall has been completed, the mudding and taping has been completed and the painting has begun!

The taper took just over a week to complete his job and despite the mess (oh, the dust) did a fantastic job. During that time we determined what the paint colours would be. I chose the colour for the eating area a year and a half ago and even had the paint already. I know, super prepared! As for our bedroom and bathroom, that was a bit more work. None of the initial choices seemed to fit the bill, they were too dark, too blue, too purple. In the end, we have gone to such a pale gray that it is nearly white. In fact, when you see it, you will probably say that it is white. Generally, I hate white walls but I think that this very slightly gray white will provide exactly the calm and soothing feeling that we are going for. I hope.

Anyway, we caved, I admit it from the get go. We are getting tired and the idea of having someone else complete a job around here with little or no help from either of us turned out to be too good to be true. We hired a painter. In our defense, he is super reasonable and a friend of a friend and was willing to get started right away. So, thanks to Doug, our eating area is painted the great colour I chose eons ago and he will be back this week for the bedroom!

With the eating area painted, today we installed the trims for the pot lights, the back entry fixture, the amazing Artichoke chandelier and the two ceiling speakers! R painted the speaker the same colour as the ceiling and walls and you hardly notice them up there! The artichoke light is everything we imagined it would be and more! After some small wiring and wire issues, it was pretty easy to install. We were finally able to remove the scaffolding from the area and we removed the plywood and cardboard etc from the floor to reveal flooring we haven’t seen since sometime in July! We moved the table back in and all the chairs and (will wonders never cease?) we actually ate dinner in the actual room designated for that purpose! It was cathartic.

Doug, the painter, was also able to get the first coat of paint done in our new closet. R, super motivated by this advancement quickly raced to stain the window and cover and stain the beam in the closet as well. That, not being quite enough for R, gave him invitation to then paint the second coat in there. This meant that R could begin on his next job (a favorite, if you ask me), flooring. Tonight, after we spent most of the day getting the eating area back in order, R got started on laying the flooring on the entry of our room and into the closet. If all goes according to plan, I will be spending my weekend, building closets and then filling them up! Seriously, what is more exciting than building furniture and then getting to filling it up with beautifully organized and colour arranged clothing and assessors!?!? It feels like Christmas!

And with that, I’m off to bed so that there can be visions of sugar-plums dancing in my head!

I have been waiting for this day for months. We have drywall!! I don’t just mean piled up on the floor like it has been since last week, I mean actually attached to the freaking walls! This is big, huge, insane! I am just a little excited. I am dreaming of paint colours….I am officially losing my mind or becoming my mother.

I can’t explain what it means to actually see our walls. The drywallers were fantastic, albeit a bit tardy. They were great workers and knew that they had a deadline. The taper comes tomorrow. He will be in and out by Friday and then I really do get to buy paint! I know, I know, I’m losing it for sure. It is not like I am choosing crazy, out there colours either. We are going simple and keeping with the cool, calm feel that we have already tried to establish through the rest of the house. Shades of grey baby, shades of grey and I’m still pumped.

On the trying to outwit the cold weather front, it is really kind of hit and miss. On Saturday, I finally helped R and we sided another small wall near the back door. R also installed the outside wall sconces. They will be awesome. The siding takes forever and the chill was not helping cold fingers work very quickly. None the less, we got one small section done, with the goal of getting another done today. The weather gods felt that we were asking too much and instead it rained today. Not exactly working outside kind of weather. Oh, well.

We pushed on and R decided to replace the dry wall that we removed during demo in the basement bathroom and patched up the holes what were in the ceiling in the kitchen and living room. Other spaces that we will conveniently forget were touched by this reno.

I, well, I have nearly reached the end of my tolerance for the chaos that seems to have invading nearly ever single area of our house. While R was patching the ceiling holes, the mess in those spaces expanded. My mom said that it was the worst it had ever been and that is saying a lot. There is no safe or clean space around here so I sought to make one. I converted the media room back into the media room. Gone is the drying rack of laundry. Gone is the mountain of boxes, wrapping, computers, paper shredder, shoes, paper…need I go on? We officially have our media room back, I mean, I dusted and everything. There is one sane space in this house, I may move there.

So on to a new week, the taper, maybe the finishing of the soffit and the eaves trough company is booked in for Friday. Pretty soon I will go and pick up our flooring and maybe even take a nap!

Hey, did I mention that I’m going to go choose paint!!! Hahahahaha, progress!

I know that I don’t need to say this but we have been crazy busy lately. We are racing to get as much as possible done outside before the weather becomes too cold.

This weekend, we finished the east facing wall of the house. It is amazing!
The soffit and fascia guy (same one who did the roof) came on Saturday and worked like crazy. He brought along this great scaffold that not only made his job easier but also enabled R, his dad and two of our amazing friends J and S to continue to make some significant progress on the cement board. All of our help have been amazing. J and S not only came on Thursday afternoon but Friday and Saturday as well. We didn’t even ask, they just called and said that they were showing up. We have incredible friends. Anyway…

The soffits are great, they are black and done!!! There is a tiny section that needs to be finished off but they are waiting for some metal that had to be ordered in. So, almost done.

The siding is incredible. The panels look amazing and the vision that we had for what our house will look like on the outside simply came to life this weekend.

And now, for they other, big, huge excitement….our insulation/vapor barrier inspection passed!!! This is huge, it now means that we can get drywall and begin (if it is not too risky to put into type) the beginning of the end. Our drywallers come on Saturday and I can’t even begin to describe how great this thought is…

Stayed tuned!

Since I promised and so many have ensured that I didn’t forget…here you go…

Well, here we are at the end of another weekend. I know that you will be shocked, but it was yet another busy and productive week around here.

First, the insulation is finally done! I had no idea that it would take so long. It didn’t help that we have 14 foot ceilings at some points and just maneuvering the ladder took forever. None the less, with that done, we are finally able to start on the vapor barrier. This will undoubtedly be another long and tedious job what with the ceiling heights coming into play yet again. It has however been started with the help of our neighbour and that is really good.

Earlier this week, we went and paid for the cedar for the two panels on the house and for the soffit area under the covered back entry. R & K picked it up on Saturday afternoon and we promptly got to work staining it. By 8:30pm we had all of the cedar stained a beautiful medium warm cedar-y colour. Apparently, we stunk up the whole neighbourhood, oops.

R also installed one more soffit light on Saturday and made sure that all of the others Were properly aligned as the soffit and facia guy (Hache Roofing, same guy who did the shingles) will be here later this week to get that going. It will be really nice to have the black soffit around the entire house. Not only will it look great to get rid of the horrible and trashed white crap on the existing portion of the house and replace it with all black but I am really looking forward a day when I can officially come home without worrying if any F-ing birds are inside. Amazing really what my life has boiled down to, no? Did I mention that since the creature incidents, we have only had three mice total? Small mercies.

Today, we decided to install the first section of the cedar panel and it looks absolutely amazing! The nuances of the wood came out great and up against the black trim of the windows it is really eye catching. Our (somewhat crazy) back alley neighbour even said that we were improving property values in the neighborhood and it even reminded him of some of the custom work found in the expensive areas. High praise indeed!

This week, my parents received our bathroom sink and faucet and this coming week, before they come home, they should also be receiving the bathroom accessories and five blinds. Yeah!

Oh yeah, and finally, if a fit of insanity R and I came across an amazing one day deal on the bed frame that we want to have in our new room and the mattress we want is on sale next week. So needless to say, we bought the bed and will buy the mattress this week. Will the hemorrhage of money ever end? Not at the rate we are going. Shit, shit, shit.

Oh, have a great week.

After the craziness of the beginning of the week, I am happy to say that it has ended very well. There is still another day to the weekend and yet there has already been so much accomplished!!!

Going back to the whole mouse and magpie thing…we seem to be rid of both for now. We caught two mice on Monday night/Tuesday morning and there has not been any evidence that any others are evading us since then and there have been no more F-ing birds. Thank goodness!!!

On Wednesday, we received our first (yep, first) dumpster for the removal of our art installation. We were lucky to know of two guys who could come out and fill the dumpster on Thursday. We had a new one delivered on Friday. Another group of crazy hard workers came to load this new dumpster. R’s dad’s friend, his son and friend came and were fantastic! One of the kids bashed his head on the dumpster but after some advil and a few tears he was ready to get back at it fairly quickly (without a lawsuit) thank goodness his father was there and it wasn’t the garbage that hurt him, only that he has trouble standing up like other people. Poor, stupid kid.
You would have thought that two 40 cubic yard dumpsters would be enough and for the most part it was but there is still a bit of debris to clean up. However, the yard looks amazing! There was some much junk that it was all you noticed about the yard. We are so happy to be free of that pressure. M is coming tomorrow with a bobcat to remove the concrete chunks and the yard will be nearly safe for Finley to actually be out there again! He was so happy to be back in the yard today that he found a sunny piece of dirt and promptly fell asleep!

This week we got going on the interior insulation. This is huge, as we can finally stop heating up the outside and of course it gets us closer to a time when we will have nothing much to be doing in the house and can move outside.

Our 17 in-ceiling speakers (no overkill at our house) were also pre-wired this week! We are really excited about the fact that when all is said and done, we will have the ability to have music in every corner of the house plus some outside as well. I can’t wait!

The final exciting thing is that we installed our new backdoor today. R’s dad did a great job of getting the hinges and lock just right and I am so pleased with the amount of light that we will have in the mornings streaming through the house! What a difference a door makes.

Since I have pretty much haven’t had to complain at all during this post (I know you were thinking about it), there are really only a few possibilities… 1. things did actually go really well this week after the mouse and bird incidents, 2. the week may have been really shitty but in light of the mice and birds we could only have gone up from there, or 3. I have been drinking this week…a lot. I will leave you to decide…

Today can only be described as having been taken directly from my nightmares. I have two fears, both somewhat irrational (well, one more than the other) but none the less I have only two fears and of course they both reared their angry heads within a day or two of each other.

The first being mice. I hate mice, it goes back about four years when one decided to take a nap in an oven mitt that I wanted to use as well. It still puts a pit in my stomach whenever I think of it….
So anyway, we have mice in the house right now. Granted, this is somewhat inevitable given the whole Reno thing but none the less we spotted the trademark black pellets and set the trapline as fast as we could. Of course, ours is (are) crafty and thus far have eaten the peanut butter off two of the traps. Undeterred, I bought more and better traps today along with some poison and some kind of sonic “get the hell away” device. Anyway, we didn’t sleep last night but hopefully with our new arsenal of death and destruction things will be better tonight.

My second fear is a bit less common but certainly after you hear this story you may develop this fear yourself. I am afraid of birds, well until today I was merely wary of them. Finley and I came home at the end of the day and as I am walking from the garage to the house, I hear this banging noise. I don’t think too much of it until I see birds reflecting in the glass on the back of the house. I look behind me, thinking that obviously they are behind me and head towards the house. As I am unlocking the back door, I suddenly realize that not only is the banging noise coming from within the house, so are the birds. That’s right, there are freaking birds inside my house, trying to break their way through the glass to get out. Finley gets in the house, notices right away and starts chasing one and I am yelling at him like a raving lunatic to get back outside. So now, virtually hyperventilating, I call R who promises to leave work right away. Thank goodness!
So, what do I do? Well, I leave of course. Fin and I headed off to Canadian Tire to buy the aforementioned arsenal of death and destruction for our other problem.
R and I arrive back at home at the same time and my hero went with an umbrella and a broom and coaxed the three, that’s right, three F-ing magpies out of our thankfully very large window in our new bedroom.

Anyway, R spent the evening adding insulation to the eaves of the new portion of the house and hopefully we will be bird free once more. And of course the death and destruction is back out in full force. Well, now at least there a chance I might sleep tonight. A small one but at this point beggars can’t be choosers.

For the third installment of the month that is September in our household, we made some really great progress…Well, not so much we but progress none the less.

By end of day Wednesday, we had passed both our plumbing rough-in inspection and our electrical rough-in inspection. This is huge because it meant that I could do something that i have been waiting to do for week and I may even mean months. I went out to the garage and hauled in a few bales of INSULATION and actually got to place some in the walls!! I can hardly contain my excitement. As I have said before, you live in my world and things like insulation are virtually mind blowing (thank goodness I went back to work and expanded my world a bit, eh?).

R did the final step in fully installing the windows and I then spray foamed the gaps. I’m sure it became warmer in that room the second I did that, well it helped a bit. Last night, as R finished up with the windows, K came over and help me haul bag and bags of INSULATION into the house.

Today, insulating began in earnest. We now have nearly all of the exterior walls insulated as well as most of the interior ones. R’s dad came today and helped make the job go much much faster. Despite my love of said insulation, I spent much of my day simply cleaning the house and trying to keep it at some livable level. At times we look around and can’t really believe that we are living through this, a vacuumed living room seems to help, me at least, a bit.

Tomorrow we head out to the garage to reclaim the space within for our vehicles. The frost we had to scrape off of our windows on Thursday morning was a harsh reminder of the winter to come.

As I awoke from the fog of the first week of school and dragged my ass into the second, we continued to make progress on the closet. R taped and mudded and he and I both painted. The drywall and taping (not to mention the bit of interior INSULATION that we put up on the back side of the closet had a huge impact on the overall temperature of our bedroom and also made it a tonne quieter. And, the dog isn’t curled up in quite as tight of a ball at night anymore.

Once we had it painted, we went out and bought an organizer kit to get things back together. Who knew how great it would be to simply have a place to put my clothes that wasn’t the living room (again, sorry neighbors) or the basement? We haven’t even filled the shelves, there is so much extra room!

My dad busted his ass all week to get all of our plumbing rough-in done and although it was touch and go for a while, he finished up mere hours before driving off to the desert for a much deserved break.

Our electricians also spent the week completing the electrical rough-in. And I am thrilled to announce that after way too long with the “kid’s braces” track lighting we had in the kitchen, we now have fantastic and wonderful pot lights. There is task lighting and overall lighting and….and…all of the lights work!!! It is so bright that R had to install a dimmer. Who knew that kitchen lighting was going to be so exciting? It may have something to do with the fact that for the last few weeks if you wanted anything from the kitchen after about 8pm, you almost needed a flashlight. Mike and Steven also installed soffit lighting around the exterior of the house and I am really looking forward to the effect that that will have.

Lighting was really a big hi-light (lame, I know) of the week. We ordered and bought nearly all of the rest of the lighting that we are adding to the house. We picked up the closet lights and a super cool retro fixture for the back entry and even ordered the awesome light that we are putting in the entrance to the new bedroom. Again, who knew that I could be this excited about lighting? Don’t laugh, you do a reno on this scale and this kind of shit will excite you too.

Onward, after the tile gong show at the end of August, I was finally able to go and pick up the last pieces of tile that we ordered for our bathroom. Despite the horrible service that R and I received the first time we went in, once I got back to dealing with the owner, everything went much much smoother and I won’t have to bad mouth them too much.

To finish off the week, on top of the closet from above and all of the lighting, we also went to Ikea for a romantic dinner and bought the closet organization for our new closet and R went and picked up the trim for the Hardie board panels for the exterior of the house. For the quick recap of what a Saturday costs in our world…I’m pretty sure that we hit somewhere between 3 and 4 units, maybe 5? Nice!