Around the house

The first thing one might notice these days when coming into the house, is our silent faithful friend to welcome you. When we first saw him at Zeller's, we just HAD to have him:) Because he is silent though he often gets overlooked and goes unnoticed, unlike the bigger cousins in the back who have no trouble at all letting you know they are anxious, very anxious to come and see you!

nick-nacks As most of you know, we're rather fond of doing things ourselves around the place, both inside and out. The projects we'll undertake span the gamut, from painting to drywall work, from electrical to plumbing, from gardening to flooring. Our focus here is primarily on what happens inside the house and its transformation. Some of the projects combine the inside and outside; such as these two goodies here: on the left you see a cd storage rack and on the right is a little bird house for in the bathroom over the toilet bowl as a nick-nack rack/toilet paper holder. They're made out of recycled old red-cedar fence boards that were cleaned up.

Things are still a bit disorganized on this site:), just like they are in the house. We've been in the process of renovating the first of our four bedrooms for way too long, but the first real signs of progress are finally there. Waita did the parquet flooring about a month ago, the room had been painted since late last year and with the recent acquisition of a pneumatic brad nailer we have begun with the installation of the wainscoting and the tranformation of the closet into a quasy armoire.

On the right the trim is up around the windows, and the finishing trim for the bottom of the ceiling cove and the top of the wainscot rail leaning against the ladder is waiting for its second coat of stain prior to installation. It's a good thing you cannot see the light fixture in the shot, it's the original one and looks utterly out of place now. BUT, it too will get replaced by something of our own design, we just have not settled on anything in particular as yet.

We think it'll all look quite special once we're all done:)

For good measure, here's how the same corner looked on May 18th, 2003. All of the trim moulding is in place and our attention can now be turned to finishing off the closet. On the right you get an impression of how we're trying to transform the closet into an armoire. The outline has been established and the next task is to build-in 2 drawers and a couple of doors to complete the illusion and make the whole space more productive storage.

Since about late spring 2004 this bedroom has served as our bedroom while we got started on the renovation of the master bedroom. We're going a bit farther with it than we did with this room: we'll take ALL the gyprock off the walls, put heavier insulation in the outside walls and insulate the inside walls for sound deadening. While the walls are exposed we'll do some extra electrical work like install some extra lighting and install wiring for cable/satellite and a computer network outlet.

What do think, eh? It's June 7th, 2003, and you cannot recognize it! We're not totally done yet, but we're getting frightfully close. The red colour ties in with the red berries in the wallpaper and the red in the drapes yet to come.

armoire Enough with the bloody armoire already!:) June 21st and the first things are in it. Yes, that's aromatic cedar at the back of the drawers and on the walls right in line with the rod; smells WUNNERFUL!

stairs One of the other projects that got finally finished is the stairs. It had been parque'd for quite some time, but we wanted to do the right thing in terms of a bullnose for the treads and tidy up where the wall meets the treads. Upstairs on the landing all the door trim (casings and custom-routed rosettes which we made ourselves) are also done at long last.