Christmas In October - Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Tuesday night after work, Ryan dropped me off at Geoff & Laura's place before he went out to the house to meet the guy who is going to be refinishing the hardwood flooring. Dad bought Geoff & Laura a rather large pumpkin...it was about 120 pounds, I think. They wanted me to draw a face on it so that Geoff could carve it. This pumpkin was HUGE! But we got it done. Here are a few pictures. Geoff ended up using a drywall knife to carve it, it was so big. While Geoff and I worked on the big pumpkin, Laura carved a smaller one, which turned out good too...I just didn't get any good pictures of it.

This is the one that Laura carved:

And this is the one that I drew that Geoff carved.

In the middle of carving, Ryan called and asked if we were ready to go yet. We were going out to Mom & Dad's for Christmas Dinner with Grandma, since she'll be in Cuba for Christmas. I told him that we weren't ready yet, and asked how his meeting went. He met with the guy that's going to be doing the refinishing of the hardwoods, and he seemed to think that we did a good job on the floors. He is going to start refinishing on November 9th, and work right through the long weekend, so that's good, at least that will be done. Then the carpets can go in, and then we should be able to move stuff in...we just won't have a counter top or stove top or kitchen sink...Hmmmm...maybe it's not worth it to move in early...


After supper we went to the house with Geoff and Laura to show them the floors. Kris had called while we were at Mom & Dad's, and said that he was working on the tiles in the bathroom upstairs, so I told him that we would be there to take a look. What he's got done so far looks really good. It's probably kinda hard for him to work, because he's working with only two lights; one set for the bathroom and one set for the garage when he's cutting the tiles to fit. He figures that he'll have everything done by Sunday night for sure. I can't wait to see the finished product. Here are some previews...


The shower floor:

The blacksplash around the tub:

And the ceiling of the shower:

We have to go to the house on Wednesday night to clean out the bathtub so that Kris can see if there are any scratches in it before he starts working on the tiling around the tub...just so that he knows if any of the scratches were his fault or not.

There's nothing much else going on at the house for the rest of the week. On the weekend we're going to move the oven, cooktop, and all of the lights into the house into their respective rooms so that when the electrician goes there on Monday he will be able to put the lights up. That should make a huge difference in the house...

Completely Floored - Monday, October 29, 2007

The main floor flooring is now completely done. Kris was in there on Monday and did a fantastic job. I love it! I think it will look really good once we get the island in there and the lighting in there and all of our stuff in there. Not that it doesn't look good now, but you know what I mean. We can only see it in the sunlight at this point, because our lights will not be hooked up until Monday. At that point, hopefully all of our lights will be hung and it will again start to feel more like a house. The flooring has helped it feel more like a house.

I got a call on Monday from the granite place where we're getting our counter tops from, and they were just going out to measure...which is what they were supposed to do sometime last week. I asked them how long it was going to take to have the counter tops installed, and she told me that from measurement to installation we were looking at...FIVE WEEKS. Hopefully she was over-estimating by quite a bit...Otherwise I don't know what we'll do. We can still probably move in and just have the countertops come in after we're already in, but they're undermounting the kitchen sink, so I don't think that we'll have a sink in the kitchen until the counters are installed...which means that I might not be able to have my Epicure Party at the new house...it might have to be at Ryan's mom's place. We'll see. Either way, I'll make it work.

Here's the laundry room/mud room as you walk through the door from the garage (the white strips are just Kris's way of marking the wet seams so we didn't walk on them):

And the kitchen (again, white strips are marking the wet seams):

Finally Done! - October 26 - 28, 2007

Well, it's finally done...the hardwood flooring that is. And the painting, with the exception of a few touch ups, I would imagine.

First and foremost, here is the wall in the living room. Norm the Painter finished this wall on Friday. Looking back, we think we should have just left the green there, because the wall colour takes away from the wood on the windows. But what's done is done. I can't even really say what colour it is, because it looks so different everytime we look at it. The colour is called Spice Variety:

Ryan and I were at the house Friday night, getting things ready for the next day when we would be finishing the wood. We quickly realized that since Norm was done the painting, he took all of his supplies...including all of the lights that we had been using previously. We tried to make do with what we had. We first of all did a water test in the shower to make sure that it wasn't leaking anywhere. We put some water down the drain and it wasn't really going anywhere. Of course, we didn't have a plunger, all we had was some balloons. I decided that I was going to use a balloon as a plunger, and Ryan just scoffed at me, thinking I was crazy. I sure proved him wrong. If you ever need a plunger and you don't have one, but you do have a balloon, use it! It works. I've tried using a 2L bottle with the spout cut off, and that works too, but the balloon works much better. We plunged with the balloon, and then realized that what we were trying to push down the drain was the water that is supposed to sit in the trap. I added a lot more water and it went down the drain without a problem. So we took a long balloon, filled it up with water, tied it off, turned it upside down and stuck it down the drain, and then proceeded to fill the shower with water. You would not believe how much water a shower floor will hold. I think we used 6 mop pail buckets full of water to get to the level we wanted to be at. So that was done. We rigged up a stick and string and attached it to the transition strip we had leaning in the shower, and hung the stick down so it was just touching the water, so that the next day when we came back, we would be able to tell if anything leaked.

We then went downstairs (which in a two-storey house when you're on the second floor means the main floor, not the basement - we actually had a discussion about this) and Ryan cut out the venting that we had previously covered over with flooring, and I started to lay out pieces of wood to be installed the next morning. I got about 7 rows down by the time Ryan was done cutting, and we went home.

Saturday morning we got to the house at about 8:30, and by 9:30, everyone who was helping us had shown up. We got to work right away, but it wasn't long before we had to stop and do some thinking and figuring out how to install a strip at the entryway to the kitchen from the hallway. That took quite some time, but once that was all figured out, we started moving quite well again. We broke for lunch at about 1:30, and we were only about 1/4 of the way done...We had some troubles again when we were fitting pieces between the posts on the stairway going upstairs, and when we got to the point where we couldn't use the nailer/stapler anymore. We kept going and stopped for supper at 8:30. It's hard to believe how fast time flies when you're working. After supper we worked for what felt like only about an hour and a half. Ryan's mom bailed out the shower while I ran the bailed water outside to dump out. We drained the shower after determining that there were no leaks. The water hadn't gone down at all, so Kris is now good to go on tiling the shower. As for the hardwood, we had a few cuts that were made wrong, and at that point we decided to call it quits for the day...about 6 boards away from finishing the whole floor. We packed up what we needed to, and got out of there. When we got into the car, I looked at the clock...it was 12:30! I could not believe that it was that late. I guess once you get working you just put your head down and power through, and time doesn't really factor into it.

On Sunday, Ryan and I went to the house and finished off the remaining boards, cleaned up each of the rooms, and finally took some pictures of the finished floors. We are supposed to meet the guy who's refinishing them at the house on Tuesday night...Hopefully he doesn't take one look and run away screaming, or up the price for refinishing it...

We also cleaned out the kitchen so that Kris can go in on Monday and install the kitchen flooring and the mudroom flooring. Again, I can't wait to get out to the house tonight to see the flooring!

It's Definitely Brown! - Thursday, October 25, 2007

The rest of the house was painted on Thursday, with the exception of the red wall in the living room. The dining room looks so good! Even Ryan, who had his reservations about such a dark colour in the dining room (he thought that it would make the wood around the windows disappear and make the room smaller), liked it. It actually makes the wood pop and stand out more. It might make it look a bit smaller, but that could be because it's still full of all of our supplies and tools for installing the hardwood. All I know is that I like it! The pictures make it look a bit darker than it is in person.

Robyn came out to the house to give us a hand. Mom and Dad were also there helping us. We got the diningroom finished and got a few boards in the entryway done too. We're hoping to have it all done by Saturday. We might take Friday night off and just relax...the only thing we will do is water test the shower before Kris installs the tiles. Kris will be installing the flooring in the kitchen on Monday, and hopefully he'll be installing the tiles in the bathroom sometime next week as well. These are some before shots of the kitchen floor, after Mom and I cleaned it all up.

Hopefully on Friday Norm the Painter will have the wall in the living room done, and have all of his stuff out of there. It will give us a little bit more room to work. I also hope that he leaves us some touch-up paint in case we knick the walls when we're doing the rest of the floors. I can't wait to get to the house Friday night and see the red wall, and finally be able to move stuff out of the dining room and see what it looks like when it's empty.

We were trying to figure out how much work was left for them to do before we can move in, and we're thinking that we might be in there in about 2 - 3 weeks; 3 weeks would take us to the weekend of November 17th. I really hope that we're in by then, so that I can still have the Epicure party that I've planned for November 24th, assuming that we'd long be in the house by now. We'll see...

My Grandma is coming in Friday night on the bus...maybe we'll put her to work at the house too...we'll get her to nail in a couple of the boards...We might be having "Christmas Dinner" with her while she's here, since at Christmas time she is going to Cuba with my Aunt and Uncle and Cousins.

On The Fifth Day, You Should Rest - Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Wednesday night was the fifth day that we'd been working on the hardwood, and nothing went right, which could mean one of two things...1 - that we should have taken a night off from working at the house, or 2 - we don't function well without Mom & Dad there. We had seams too close together so we had to rip out a board or two, we had a few wrong cuts that had to be redone, and the list goes on. We ended up only getting a few rows done, when we were hoping to get the whole dining room done. Oh well...Thursday is another day. Hopefully we can get more boards done with the Moms helping out. It seems that more than three people works out better. We're at the point now where we can't use the nailer to put the boards in because we're too close to the wine racks, so we have to use screws instead. That should be a little bit easier.

Norm the Painter was still there when we got there, and was there for quite a while while we were there, painting the upstairs bedrooms and hallways and bathroom. And it all looks good. On Thursday he will be painting the main floor, including our chocolate brown dining room and the red wall in the livingroom. I've taken a before picture of the living room wall, and I can't wait to take the after picture.

Don the Geothermal Guy, "Plumber", and Don's electrician were there last night as well, still hooking up the geothermal unit. They got it running and installed the thermostat, so at least we know the heating system is working properly.

Ray was there as well and put up the spindle things on the porch stairs. At least we think he was there on Wednesday. It could have been Tuesday and we just might not have noticed it...

Here's poor tuckered out Ryan, curled up with Dexter. Dexter does NOT look happy in either of these pictures. Perhaps because Ryan's drooling on him? Not to sure...