Oct 21

Once again, it’s been many days without an update. Renos continue to be the consuming thing in my life. But we continue to make progress. We have spent a couple of nights staying up way later than is healthy. The man has this amazing stamina. I don’t know where it comes from but if you could bottle it and sell it as an energy drink you’d be rich in short order. I tap out and he keeps going for hours. So here are some pictures to show you what we’ve been up to.

Our first breakfast actually sitting at a table, in the house! Up until that point we’d been sitting on the floor. The dirty, dirty floor. Please avert your eyes.

Newly laid tile floor and brand new bannister for the stairs. Cleaned up just for the picture.

My sex-ay kitchen. We just finished the grout on the backsplash yesterday! I am in love with it!

Jen inspired me with this post to take a break from renos and spend some time getting my craft on making this Christmas wreath. I love it and I want to make one for every single season and holiday.

Let’s see…what else is going on? Mostly unpacking and a total lack of order and cleanliness. Don’t be fooled by the pictures. We are just a hair above living in complete and utter squalor. The bathrooms have colonies of new life growing in the sinks and toilets.  I have vowed to do something about this before the week is out.

Also, I have booked a holiday. A holiday just for me. The first trip I have taken since Kieran was born over three years ago. How did three years pass without me spending a single night away from mah baybee? I don’t know. Actually I do know. We moved. Three times. Starting when Kieran was still a baby. But here I am finally going away for several days in a row! To visit my best friend and her baby who was born last spring.

I have been spending every waking moment planning and dreaming about sitting on a plane for hours with no one to entertain or be responsible for except myself! Imagine that! And then getting to spend some time snuggling my pseudo-nephew! I am a happy woman!

I apologize for the lack of posting. Unfortunately I can’t yet promise that it will improve right away, but the blog is not forgotten. I’m constantly thinking I *should* post about various things and then the next thing I know it’s days weeks later and the great idea is forgotten. Thanks for hanging in there everyone!

Oct 6

This morning was monumental in terms of progress. We ate breakfast at our very own kitchen table, sitting in REAL CHAIRS! It’s the first time in five weeks that we’ve eaten a single meal in our house at a table and not sitting out on the deck (when the weather was better) or on the floor inside. Nothing else has been moved into the house but at this point we’re celebrating small victories.

In other news, Saskatchewan’s claim to being the sunniest province in Canada has apparently been a gigantic lie. Because the last week has been a salute to climate change. Clouds, rain, cold, more clouds and more rain. Holy hell Saskatchewan! Other than the people, the sun was the one thing that made us willing to put up with the nasty winters.

I know, waa-waa! Enough whining already! I did get an award recently from the lovely Jen at Harried Mom of Four.  It was especially flattering to get this when my posts have been so few and far between lately. So thanks Jen! 

No strings attached here. We are just supposed to pass on the love to four people who give great blog! My four are:

Anne Nahm

Shannon at Charming Bitch

Karly at Wiping Up Snot

Susan at Trout Towers

Go check them out. You can thank me later. And I promise – more pictures of the renos coming soon!

Sep 21

I’ve had a number of requests for pictures of the goings-on in renovation purgatory our new place. So here, for your viewing enjoyment, are a just a few pieces of photographic evidence that I am not making up the conditions in which I’ve been living for the past 3 weeks!

These pics really don’t capture the horror that is wallpaper. But every wall you see here is covered in wallpaper except the one at the end of the hall on the left picture. Up the stairs? Wallpaper. In the kitchen (below)? Wallpaper. In the bedrooms (also below)? WALL-FRICKIN’-PAPER!

Again the picture really doesn’t show how bad the kitchen is, but the wall that the fridge is on basically divides the kitchen in half. It was a ridiculous layout. But we have since remedied that issue.

This is how we fix “layout issues” in my household…

…aaaand like so….

The kitchen with all the cupboards and walls removed…

Kieran has discovered the joy of the shop-vac.

Thankfully no one actually fell through any of the multiple large holes in our floors and ceilings…

…especially when we no longer had a ceiling and the floor was stripped down to the original slats (whenever we swept, all the dust would fall through to the basement and you can imagine how much I loved that!).

Here is what we slept on for the first 2 weeks in the house…

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And here is what it currently looks like in our garage, where all our worldly possessions are currently being stored…

…and where we currently eat our breakfast each morning…

So things are actually better than they appear in the pictures as we have made a lot of progress this weekend. I have moderately high hopes of having a functioning kitchen by the end of this week – minus countertops though, so that will be fun. Regardless, the work continues and I promise I will post pics when things are at least semi-completed!

Sep 19

I hung curtains in my bedroom tonight, yo! No more peep shows for the neighbours! Tonight the ceiling and walls being primed! That is the smell of progress, my friends!

That is all. Carry on!

Sep 13

I have learned a few things since we began the renovation process several weeks ago and I am here to share my wisdom with you:

  • There is more dust inside the walls and floors of your house than you ever imagined possible. You can’t possibly prepare for it. So don’t even try.
  • There is no excuse for painting anything flesh-coloured (as in Caucasian flesh, other skin colours are much classier choices for paint).
  • Sleeping on air mattresses gets old really quickly. But remembering to pump it up with a little extra air every few days goes a long way. If you are wondering why you are so damn uncomfortable…it could be because your mattress is only at 25% capacity.
  • Renovations make me bitchy cranky.
  • My husband and father-in-law have a bottomless fountain of energy from which to draw. It must be genetic. I don’t know how they do it but they have been working on the house 20 hours a day without stopping for 10 days now. My father-in-law is taking vacation time to come and help us, which is incredibly generous. However – WORST. VACATION. EVER. Sleeping on an air mattress and working til you drop every day is not my idea of a holiday. Just sayin’.

Random stuff I’ve been wanting to tell the internets:

  • Elementary school in Boston was guarded like the freaking White House. Picking up a child from school was practically a secret service mission, what with no entrance to the school without filling out visitor forms. School here is like a free-for-all. They don’t care how the kids get to their classrooms, so long as they get there. They don’t care who picks them up or where they go after the bell rings! The teacher’s first parent letter indicated her goal for the children this year is independence. I fully endorse this goal but after the red tape, overprotective atmosphere over kindergarten I’m getting whiplash just dealing with it all!
  • Everyone keeps saying Saskatoon has had no mosquitoes until September. Remarkably, when we arrived in town. The mosquitoes waited for me to show up and then moved in to feast. I am undone. Really, just covered in bites!
  • I have never been so aware of the easygoing Canadian attitude before. After being away for a while it has never been so apparent. I like it!
  • All moving companies are, without exception, completely corrupt and out to rob you of every last penny.
  • Things have been rocky with our moving company, or can you tell?
  • They charged us the equivalent of several mortgage payments extra for “packing services” because we ended up putting a lot more on the truck than we originally intended (because we bought our kitchen for the new house in the states and brought it back with us). But the kitchen was all in boxes. It required no extra packing. Loading yes. Packing no. Loading charges did not change. The cost of the Lose Weight Exercise changed, which is fair. The cost of the packing changed, which is not fair. We will contest this.
  • We were told our belongings would be delivered no later than September 10. They are arriving tomorrow, September 14. Why yes, that is smoke coming out of my ears! Thanks for noticing!
  • It is really refreshing to make such a big move and already know where everything in the city is and how to go about getting settled. Really refreshing! We know where the grocery stores and schools and parks are. We know which events to look forward to. We know which friends we can call and beg to help us with our home renos…. Ahem.
  • My Massachusetts driver’s licence broke the computer system of the local licence provider. I went to switch back to a SK licence and they had it all printed out but realized they hadn’t entered it correctly so they could create a new photo id. So they tore it up and started over. And then they started over again. And then they called the help desk. Five times. And I waited for a full hour (which I know doesn’t seem like much to those of you in big cities, but for Saskatoon if you have to wait five minutes it’s a HUGE FREAKING DEAL). And then they told me to go do what I needed to do and they would call and let me know when I could come back. And then they called and said my Massachusetts licence broke their whole system and it will be a week before they can get the bug fixed so I should come back then. Awesome.
  • A large percent of people here can’t pronounce Massachusetts. You would think that anyone who can pronounce “Saskatoon, Saskatchewan” without any problems would already have the linguistic dexterity necessary to pronounce MASS-AH-CHEW-SETS. Most common mispronounciations: Mass-a-two-shits and Mass-a-two-sits. It amuses me.

Ok, I think we’re done. Hopefully the blog is working and you can all read this. I’ve been experiencing technical difficulties recently so if you’ve been seeing nothing past August 22 and now suddenly see several new posts, it’s not you, it’s me.

Sep 7

Dear Sir/Madam,

The many disturbed minds in the world have not yet devised a form of torture that is painful or humiliating enough to satisfactorily punish you for creating such a fiendishly difficult-to-remove wall covering.  Even when wallpaper removal is going “well” it is still going TERRIBLY BAD and is only marginally better than having two root canals. While giving birth. To triplets. And being run over by a truck.

Those who continue to put up wallpaper are the only beings worthy of more contempt than yourself as they are responsible for the suffering of home-renovators like myself around the world – those of us who wish to make a simple change of paint colour but must first remove miles upon miles of wallpaper!

And don’t tell me that wallpaper is coming back “in” because it’s not. Not into my house, anyway.

Screw you!

Love,
Shannon

Sep 5

When involved in a home renovation as thorough as what we are currently doing (and by we I do mean the hubby), one has to expect all kinds of surprises, both good and bad. Surprises like discovering venting in a wall you had intended to tear down and plumbing that was apparently being held together by dust and when the walls surrounding it were torn down the dust was disturbed and the leaking started. And the fact that what seemed like not too much wallpaper stretches out before you like a task that will continue on into perpetuity.

We the hubby has torn out so many walls and cupboards and flooring that I fear we will soon run out of house altogether. After briefly considering scraping off the stipple from the ceiling to redo it once the various bare patches are fixed, the ceiling was also torn down. No one wants to miss the chance to hit things with sledgehammers around here!

I feel like a pioneer with the flooring stripped down to the bare planks which is all that keeps us from falling through to the basement and which have big enough cracks between the floorboards that we can see right down into the basement. We moved the fridge into the garage and are eating in there while sitting on the concrete step.

Totally roughing it. (Yes, I realize that pioneers didn’t have fridges. Or garages.)