North Glenora Reno

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!

I know, I know, I know. It has been weeks and weeks since I updated you on the reno and I’m sorry but, well, umm, I went back to work and well, my whole life has gone crazy.

So here we go, I think that I will do several posts for you so that you (and I) don’t get too confused and stay fairly close with the timeline. I did write a lovely and lengthy post the day before school started but lost the whole thing before I could upload and well look what has happened…

If we go back, way back, we would find ourselves at the beginning of September. The new windows were finally all in and I felt that I could at least leave the house for the day and know that it was secure. The lack of heat was a big issue for us as it got pretty chilly at the end of August, I may have mentioned that. My dad worked like a madman and got us heat early on in the month but in the interest of not heating up the entire neighbourhood, he didn’t run heat into the new space. The day we finally got heat will also go down in history as The Pizza Night. Mom and dad, M and R & I worked all day and we thought that pizza would a great idea for dinner. I carefully chose 4 different pizzas to give everyone lots of choices and then mom and I went to pick them up. Upon returning, we realized that the pizzas we brought home were not the pizzas we ordered. So, I called Panago and explained the issue and they offered to bring us our order but since the starved wolves at the table had pretty much already dove in I said not to worry about it and they offered to add a credit to my account instead. So, no problem, 4 pizzas we didn’t order but we all found something we were willing to eat. Not ten minutes later, a guy from Panago arrives with the pizzas we ordered and told us to keep them all. So we ended up with 8 pizzas between 5 people and meals for the next week and I’m pretty sure that there is a 4 pizza credit on my account! Oh yeah and I’m pretty sure that we each ate about 20 more pieces than we really wanted. We pretty much just rolled away from the table. Anyway….

So the old?, existing? part of the house became warm but the new, not so much. None the less, R stopped sitting in front of the space heater with the dog to eat his breakfast and went back to the table like regular people do. They were priceless (read: pathetic) to see though.

On the day of The Pizza Night, we also made some serious progress towards R and I gaining some sense of normalcy and sanity really. M came over and he and R drywalled the new closet in out existing room. Not sure if I mentioned but we used to have two little closets and we decided that through this process we would combine them into one proper sized one. The closet taking shape will prove to be a remarkable step forward as R and I have clothes all over the house. I mean, I have been making the morning dash into the living room for underwear for weeks. The neighbors will likely be disappointed though…None the less, it needed to be done.