Ok, I may be pushing it a bit far saying a flood but there WAS water all over the floor. I was doing laundry and went back downstairs to switch the loads and before I even got to the laundry room I noticed water all over the floor - dark soapy water. I was washing a rug that we put in the kitchen in front of the sink (so it’s softer on our little feets) which means it is black, full of fluff and of course animal hair (love you guys…). I guess the little fluffies from the rug backed up the sink and it filled up, up and over! So I went upstairs and called Ted, sent him to look in the basement and then I fell down the stairs… seriously. I only pinched my baby finger (I have no idea how). Now it has blood pooling under my skin and a big bruise. Actually today it hurts a lot but is also kind of numb… strange.

Anyway, we had to move a bunch of things around so that the water drain into the well, drain, in the next room. We also had to pick up some foam tiles (I have them around the laundry area so that it is softer on my feets… hmmm, trend) and move some construction material that we don’t want to get moldy. Then we turned the de-humidifier (thank you Warren) on bust and hopefully when we get home today, anything that was still damp will be dried out.

However, the very lucky thing about this whole situation is that if we hadn’t cleaned up down there it would have been disgusting and we would of had no space to move things around and clean up! Yah for us!

It isn’t really our fault. We haven’t had the money or the time to do anything around the house… I’m sorry! We still have to do a bathroom post as it was the first thing we did. I’ll get the pics up and do that soon.

I wanted to give a little update on what we have done… we cleaned up the basement. Doesn’t sound that exciting but I swear it is. Ever see Clean Sweep? Well our basement looked like that, only dirty and with more cat hair… seriously. It was gross, we were using it as a storage room, and place to keep the stuff we STILL haven’t unpacked and a dumping ground. Neither of us even liked going down there, it was that unpleasant.

So I was getting ready to do laundry and picked up some napkins from the floor and found ants, only a few tiny ants but I found them. Technically, I can blame Carly… yes Carly. At her birthday party I made pizza fondue, which was fun… well Carly was a little, well drunk, and was eating the pizza sauce off my white linen napkins. Both Eric and Ted were like, ‘Carly, no’ and took it away from her. However, something else we’ve picked up from Carly and Eric is throwing our napkins and dish towels down the basement stairs. So the combination of Ted and I not liking to go in the basement and Carly’s pizza napkin meant that ants had a little meal! Vomit… (that was me, being sick…) So, Ted and I tackled the basement… yah! We took about $10 of bottles to the beer store, a car load to good will and a pile of stuff went in the trash. Why we couldn’t of done it before we moved, I don’t know!?! So now the place is put together and not full of crap… I feel lighter!

Maybe I will even get a picture up… it is still not pretty but it is less gross than it has ever been and no ants, ever again!

As Thanksgiving was approaching, we thought it would be a great if we had the rest of the living areas at a presentable state. The living room wasn’t pretty, the entranceway had a perfectly hideous floor, the bannister was falling off in the stairwell, and the upstairs needed a coat of paint too.

Jeez, I don’t even know where to begin…

THE LIVING ROOM: The biggest challenge in this room was probably the lovely artistic border that I believe we’ve mentioned earlier on this site. Shannon did most of the work on that beauty whilst I ran around the room replacing outdated and probably dangerous electrical outlets and switches. She mostly used the big bad scaper that was heavily employed in the Attack on the Kitchen to varying degrees of success. She also used a handy product called the Paper Tiger which was basically rolled around over the wallpaper to score it lightly so that another product, called Dif could really get in under the paper and let her scrape it off easily. Let’s see… other stuff in the living room… patching the holes in the stucco ceiling from about 15 hooks up there. (why? who knows…). We used a product that we can’t recommend enough. It’s called simply Stucco Patch and is made by a company called Homax. Their website doesn’t do it justice, but it patched those holes in the stucco so well that we couldn’t tell the difference between the patched areas and the original stuff. Incedentally, painting stucco sucks. I’ve done it twice now and I don’t recommend it. I also replaced the piece of lumber in front of the sliding doors. It was cracked and broken and looked awful. This was a pretty big challenge all on it’s own as I discovered that the wood had been notched out to accomodate some insulation and the concrete door sill under it. I wound up just replicating the piece of wood by cutting and notching a piece of cedar planking to fit. Oh yeah… we painted the room too (see photos below!)

THE ENTRACEWAY: In the entranceway, the biggest goal, aside from painting, was the gawd-awful floor. Somewhere down the line, we’re planning on re-tiling the floor in here with a nice stone tile, but as a super-cheap stopgap, we yanked out the quarter-round, bought an indoor/outdoor mat, cut it to fit, and replaced the quarter-round over it! Frankly, I think it looks great for a $40 solution! We also pulled all the old sealant out of the long tall window in here and replaced it. It was all moldy and gross.

THE STAIRS: I don’t know if I’ve ever really talked about the stairs, but when we first got in this place, they had carpet on them. Really stinky old mouldy carpet that had mystery stains on it, and horrid old under padding under it that had pretty much been compressed into powder. I won’t go into it, but I spent an entire day removing the underpadding step-by-step and actually had to sand it off in places. Ayway, they look much nicer now. that the rises have been cleaned and painted. Also Shannon deserves a lot of praise for managing to paint all the way up to the ceiling in there with nothing but a big heavy extension pole for help (I was at work). Oh yeah, and now the bannister isn’t a deadly hazard.

-Ted.

Before:

During:

After:

What’s left: Some paint touch-ups, some kind of treatment on the wall behind the stove - its a little rough back there, and the rest of the bloody house.

-Ted.

The kitchen is pretty much done now. Last weekend with the help of Morag (a co-worker of Shannon who has knowledge of such things) we tiled the countertops and backsplash. They look really amazing. We went with a shiny black 4″ sqare tile and a dark-grey grout. You would think that that much black/grey would be a bit much, but on top of the white cabinets, it looks really sharp. We also added some of the white tiles left over from the bathroom as an accent behind the sink and it looks great.

I took a couple of days off to do some of the final necessarry bits like wiring the dishwasher, installing the sink & faucet, finishing the electrical, installing under-cabinet lighting, and caulking the corners.

What’s left? Well this weekend I put in a cat-door down to the basement and replaced quarter-round and baseboards in select places. I still need to seal the grout, run some more caulking here and there, Shannon has some paint touch-ups to do, and we need to install the doorknobs on the pantry and basement doors.

It’s the home stretch! (for the kitchen, at least)

-Ted.

Our tiles came in last week. They are beautiful, black and shiny. It is going to be awesome. However we discovered when we tried to plan when they were going in that with my hectic schedule we don’t have a free weekend until July 29. Plus the beautiful and talented Morag (kissing up is important to people who offer you their skills) is going to be around that weekend to help us unskilled lay our counter and backsplash. We are likely to have a BBQ and go swimming at Dan and D’s as well so it will be a good time. However that does mean a few more weeks without a full kitchen. That is ok; it will be over soon…

Otherwise we’ve been unpacking some things. Ted has been working hard at putting together the office. He is very excited to have 3 crappy computers up and running and networked together. I’ve been trying to work on the spare room/sewing room. We ordered a new futon mattress (it came in with the tiles) and I won a futon cover on eBay just last night. I am going with a very simple Asian theme in there. However, we can’t find the hardware for the futon so I can’t put it together. Arrrg. It must be in a box somewhere… but where I have no idea! Plus as we’ve been trying to unpack these rooms we realize that we really need shelving or closet systems for the spare room and the office. I just can’t see spending $300 on shelving for each of those rooms… that seems excessive. So if anyone knows a cheaper way to organize closets… please share!

The floor went in a couple of weeks ago. Ted did it one Friday evening while was I was out participating in some debauchery with Morag. The template took him days and the floor just a few hours… wow!

Our cabinets are in. Ted installed them last weekend, I’m sure he will post about the process soon! They are so wonderful. I can’t tell you how exciting it is starting to look. Ted was feeling pretty ill this weekend so I finished up the interiors and the cabinet doors on Saturday. Yah, at least it will feel like I did more than paint the room! Then on Sunday I marked the cabinets and Ted put on the handles.

I spent most of Sunday afternoon, very quickly unpacking ALL the kitchen boxes. Dan and D are moving in two weeks (can’t wait till you’re in the burbs… evil cackle) and we wanted to give them as many good boxes as we could. Plus it made me feel that we weren’t wasting all those boxes. Man, do we have a lot of stuff. There are some things that we don’t need anymore but not much. I was thinking that maybe we could get rid of some things, but we actually use most of it on a pretty regular basis. I unpacked into the dining room as well and it is really starting to come together.

What is the most exciting is how much space we have! I’ve always had to squeeze everything together to make it fit, but now things are organized and neat. I can easily see everything and get to things without having stuff fall on my head or pulling out half the cabinet to do it! YAH!

Now we are waiting on tiles to get the counter top in. I can’t wait. It is looking so good I’ve been standing in the doorway just staring with a big smile on my face… it is just now starting to feel like OUR home…

He had once to listen to me (a long time ago) crying, sitting on the floor of my bedroom in the basement that I had just painted this horrible pinky maroon color, that had to be the most depressing color ever, that ‘I would never in my life like light colors’. He had kindly suggested that maybe the room was a little dark for a basement - rightly so - and I freaked out on him. Poor guy. Anyone who knows me, knows that I can be a little, well, over dramatic at times… Ted now brings up this ridiculous comment anytime I suggest, well any paint color really. The whole point of that story was that when we were trying to figure out what color to paint our kitchen that was white, black, stainless with red accents, I wanted to suggest red but thought he wouldn’t go for it, but he came up with it himself. I’ve converted him… hehe.

I will let you know though, that I did learn to like light colors, our whole house is not going to be red and black, I promise!

OUR KITCHEN IS PAINTED! It is the first big thing that actually gave us a feeling that we are moving ahead on our projects. We didn’t do much of the bathroom ourselves so it was almost done by the time we actually had to live in the house. Everything else we’ve done, new breaker box, furnace and AC, cabling, plastering, sanding, etc. all made the house look worse (if that’s possible). Even all the wonderful things we were buying and/or getting delivered (flooring, appliances, cupboards) are just making piles in our living room. We are now climbing over things to get to the couch… plus it has been very hard to clean with all the plaster dust floating around. But now we have a bright red kitchen, yes I said red.

We really need stuff in there to compensate for the giant red room… pics to come soon! I am so excited, the end of the tunnel (in the kitchen) is near…

It seems to be constructed rather haphazardly in the corner of the basement next to the entry to the laundry/furnace area and has a random, afterthought-esque quality to it, as though it were just inserted into the wall because someone thought that a shower next to your gas meter would be super-cool.

What really creeped me out when I discovered it was the freakish red daubed letter “F” that seems to be on the wall behind the shower construction. I sure hope that’s not written in blood!

I honestly can’t imagine using it as a shower as the floor is cracked and flaking, the drain is little more than a hole in the floor, and the wall and ceiling tiles are tenuous at best. I can only imagine getting dirtier by going into it.

Eventually, I intend on ripping the back wall out of it and extending it into the little hidey hole that houses the gas meter. With the extra space, a good light-proof door, and some re-jigging of the plumbing, it would make a pretty good little basement darkroom - which is something I’ve coveted for many moons.

For now though, we just use it for cat poop.

-Ted.