WE'RE ALIVE!

But, very busy! I apologize for the dirth of blogging activity. So far this week, we've listed the house and have conditionally sold it - all in one day! We leave tomorrow for NS to buy the house we will be moving into in early August. Wish us luck and I will be back to blogging the second week of May.

THE VINYL GUY (CONT’D)

That title means, yes, it’s true. He’s. Still. Here.

Unfortunately, there was a bubble under the vinyl in the kitchen (caused by the sub-floor de-laminating – something it’s guaranteed NOT to do) and that had to be repaired so the nice installer is just getting to nailing in the ¼ round edging en route to finishing. Yes, it IS after 3:00 PM on Friday. A day later than he expected and he’s still working!

The last part of the job is for him to put sealant on all of the seams. Unlike how the floor previously looked with the ‘peel and stick’ squares and metal transition strips between every room, this installer has perfectly matched all of the joined seams. Therefore, there are only going to be metal strips transitioning between the vinyl and carpet on top of the basement stairs and from the vinyl to the carpet going into the living room. This technique really gives a better feeling of space and, actually, makes the vinyl look a little more like tile! It looks really good. However, the sealant takes about 3 hours to dry and is really smelly so the installer doesn't want me in the house when it's drying. The cats are barred up in our bedroom and Para and I will be taking the van to a walking spot and, maybe, a picnic with DH, while we wait for the fumes to go down.

Here is a ‘before’ picture seeing as I nothing else interesting going on in my life right now besides renovations and organising (and I’m sure you don’t want to see pictures of boxes!). Note the 23 year old original vinyl in the closet and the ‘peel and stick’ on the left. I thought the ‘peel and stick’ looked pretty good (it was here when we bought the house) until the new vinyl went down. The new stuff looks a lot better:


Here are sample photos of the sub-floor that the installer laid before the vinyl went down:


Later, I hope to have completed vinyl pictures for you when the job is done. No, no predictions on when that’s going to be. I’m way past the ability to predict anything now…

THE LAUGH IS ON US (or) ATTACK OF THE VINYL GUY

Not much happening around my blog this week, eh? Here’s why. Here’s what we did on Sunday night (DH did most of the moving, don’t worry. I more act in a ‘supervisory’ capacity these days).

As you can see, the refrigerator is in the living room (albeit, plugged in). So is our stove. No biggie, right? After all, the flooring will only take one day to install so that’s one days worth of take out and we’re ready to go. One day was how long it took to do the carpet…

HA! The nice vinyl flooring guy got here on Monday. By about 3:00 PM when DH called for a progress report I said, a little hesitantly, that I didn’t think the floor would be finished on Monday. Maybe Tuesday? DH got home and spoke to the installer (I was happily – and blissfully ignorant – camped out on the basement floor on my Thermarest camp mattress (we don’t have a bed or a couch down here) for my afternoon nap). When DH came down to nudge me, he says,

"Did you ask the installer how long it will take him to install the floor?"
"No." Came my muffled reply from the basement floor.
"He figures it’s going to take him four days!" DH says a little incredulously. I started to laugh and laugh! This type of disaster is so typical of us! The installer even said to DH that the flooring companies never write on the invoice how long the installation is going to take. We now know to ask next time!

Note: we were to have our first real estate meeting on Thursday evening. You know, the kind of meeting where you walk through your sparkling house, admiring the gorgeously decorated spaces while enjoying a cup of tea and the views of a nice green lawn without spring apples in the backyard. I refer you back to photograph number one. This is what our living room will look like at 5:00 PM, Thursday evening (Newfoundlanders call anytime after noon ‘evening’). The meeting was set for 7:00 PM Thursday evening.

Our meeting is now changed to next week giving me the weekend and, Lord knows, whatever other time I need to clean up the main floor. Did I mention that the weather was so bad for the past two days that the installer had to do all of his sub-floor cutting inside and that sub-floor for vinyl flooring needs to have the seams sanded down? You wouldn’t believe the dust. The worst thing is, my mother-in-law has me under strict orders not to be washing any walls (another Newfoundland spring ritual)…she didn’t mention dusting them though…

In the meantime, seeing as we can’t work on the main floor, we have concentrated on other areas of the house. The basement has only 4 boxes left for DH to look through and sort and then we’ll have officially gone through all of the containers in our storage area and organised/gutted them. I’m so proud of us! Not so the garage but, that’s another story perhaps worthy of blogging about.

Another project DH has been working on is our master bedroom (it was yet another item on the 'things we must do before selling the house' list). Since we purchased this house in 2002, we renovated two of the bedrooms and put down laminate flooring (the same type and dye lot as is in the basement). We also purchased enough to put in the master bedroom and here are the results:

Before (unlike Yarn Harlot, I did not clean up our room before taking these pictures. I didn’t get a chance to capture the big mess before DH had the furniture moved out. I figured saving images of our untidiness for posterity only serves to add to the overall impact at the end of the job (assuming the ‘after’ pictures include a neat room, of course). Note the 20 year old carpet:

During:

And, after!

These were taken just a few minutes ago, the cats are just checking out the new space. The duvet cover may need to be changed – I might get a chance to get out next week and look for a new one – and one of the wall pictures (another plate) is in the living room so that’s not up yet. There’s just no way this body can fit into the living room right now.

Regardless of a few touch ups (the need to re-paint and re-install the closet doors, new electrical plate covers and some telephone wiring) we think it looks pretty darn good!

Off to a pre-natal appointment…

WEEK 28 BUMPALUMP

As promised, here is a bump picture taken last week at snowy Lake Louise (neither DH nor I had ever been there in the snow before). Lots of people were out walking across the lake but, as you can probably tell, I wasn’t really dressed for a hike and we were trying to get to Calgary at a decent hour. You can also probably tell that my coat selection has become compromised – this green fleece is the only thing with the flex to go around my tummy. Luckily, pregnancy warmth had hit and I was quite comfy despite being in a dress with no long johns! Notice the shoes? It was spring when we left Summerland and turned into winter the closer we got to Calgary. Creston, too, had the tulips up and the forsythia blooming. Lake Louise and Calgary provided a bit of preparation back into the reality of an Ottawa "spring".

We’re still working like mad around here. I will post more renovation pictures soon. Our progress was somewhat challenged today by the alternator in the car dying. DH was out running errands when the battery light came on. Unfortunately, that meant quite the expensive trip to the garage and a change of errand plans (thus a delay in work) so we could get the car to the garage ASAP. Sigh.

Tomorrow afternoon we meet with the military’s move people and see when we can go on our house hunting trip (HHT) as well as determining other intricate details of our upcoming move. The excitement never ends!

To top is all off, DH just had a Dairy Queen craving so Para and I drove up to Dairy Queen (it’s a nice long walk in the summer but way too far to walk on a dark and rainy evening) to get us some ice cream. Turns out Baby likes ice cream and is still kicking for joy! His/her father’s child! And here we are, back at Lake Louise, with the ‘long arm shot’ provided by DH.

THE THINGS WE DO BEFORE MOVING…

The first thing we do is go to a par-tay! The party for Grandma H was fantastic and went off without a hitch. It was a great opportunity for story telling and, with about 120 people in attendance at the birthday reception on Saturday, March 31, we certainly heard a few stories. Grandma was a great sport and offered comment throughout the speeches. Congratulatory letters were read from the Governor General, the Prime Minister, the Premier, the local MLA and, the best one of all, was read from Creston’s Mayor. It was very touching and included a heartfelt thank you to a woman who helped deliver most of the current residents of the Creston valley! Even the ‘youngsters’ who used to live around Grandma’s family growing up, not only showed up for the big event but also got up to talk about all the trouble they used to get into and how Grandma H was there to help out in her capacity as a nurse! It turns out you have to turn 90 for some of these confessions to come out! DH’s mother and aunt put a lot of time and effort into each of the events and it really showed.

We had a great visit with as many of DH’s relatives on his mother’s side as we could. The weekend was something similar to a wedding in that you get to see everyone but hardly have the chance for a real heart to heart chat. On Sunday morning, the immediate family (about 20) went out for a birthday brunch before some of the travellers had to head back to their homesteads.

DH and I also took the opportunity to visit with some other folks in that mountainous part of Canada during the week: a retired CF couple that we know who have settled into their gorgeous home in Cranbrook; DH’s aunt and uncle on his father’s side in Summerland, BC; both of his cousins and their families as well as other friends in Calgary. Altogether, it was a great trip. My ankles swelled moderately but I was still able to get my ‘fancies’ on for the birthday event so the feet weren’t too bad.

And, since we’ve been home, the second thing we do before moving is put in new flooring. Here is our house's original carpet (the house is 23 years old) in the living room:

You’d think that when you hire people to come in and replace your flooring that they come in, do it, and leave. However, DH and I are cheap. This means some ‘sweat equity’ had to be put into the whole experience (saving us $ by doing some things ourselves). Therefore, DH moved all of the furniture out of the living room, (I pushed and advised) including a piano! Here is all of that furniture stuffed into the dining room (which has become a new cat playground...):

He also pulled up all the old carpet, screwed down the original sub-floor to get rid of the squeaks, and put down new sub-floor in the living room.

The same, less a new sub-floor, had to be done with the main to second floor stair case.

The basement staircase had a vinyl covering so he only had to remove the toe pieces and the carpet could be laid over the vinyl.

And here is the finished, carpet project.

Nope, I'm not showing you the finished stairs. See that vacuum? It's on it's last legs and I think the living room killed it before I could attack the stairs...

Next, we move all of our living room furniture back into the living room – and fill up the living room with the rest of the stuff from the main floor before the new vinyl flooring people get here on Monday!

More on other renovations, a new bump picture and knitting content to follow later this week. Whew! Blogging dedication takes effort!