All I want for Christmas...

"Is for this @#"$ siding to be finished!" says Stef. Well, he gets his wish. The last nails went in on Friday, just in time for a very sunny Christmas eve, and it looks lovely. Nice one Stef!

All Freya wants for Christmas is her two front teeth -- and she's got them too (the bottom two that is). The little razor blades haven't done me too much damage yet, and though they made for a few restless nights and a lot of drool, they didn't seem to be too too painful for Freya either. She's eating a spoonfull of rice cereal a day now, and on Christmas the plan is to give her a little pureed turkey with milk. Mmmmm.

Meanwhile the interior is being painted -- a creamy white everywhere except a few rooms: grey blue for my office/playroom, maroon for the master bedroom, and light yellow for Freya's room.

And the exterior world has also gone a lovely white, white, white... there's about a foot of lovely powder out there, which makes it tricky to get the stroller around but very pretty indeed.

Merry Christmas everyone! Hope you have a white one too :)

Going green

It has taken more than 2 months, but the siding is finally nearly done, turning the house from the white of Tyvak wrap to the much prettier green of our siding. This has the dual effect of making the house look like a proper, grown-up house, instead of a toy project, and also helps it to blend in a bit with the landscape. (It irritates us when people say it looks huge... we're happy for it to blend in a bit! Ironically it has just started snowing, so as the house gets greener the landscape is getting whiter). This has been achieved thanks to the hard work of friend Pete (a proper carpenter who usually designs kitchens) along with the helping hands of a handful of other friends and workers, and this nifty blue machine (pic), which I believe is called a cherry picker, but I call the big blue machine thingy.

Stef is taking great pains to do a good job, making sure it will stay waterproof, and that all the fiddly bits around the windows and roofline are done just-so. As a result it looks amazing.

All about Freya...

Some photos of Freya's first month of life. Isn't she adorable? We think so...

Moving week

FINALLY, we have moved in to the suite!! It's pretty much done, though there's a list of 20 odds and ends yet to do now posted on the fridge, from baseboard trim to plugging up the hole in the wall in the bathroom. Small things. Meanwhile we love the place. It already feels like home, and we can now walk to the grocery store and anywhere else we fancy. Such a joy. Freya and the cat have adapted seemlessly. So all is well!

Freya on site

Middle of August and moving day looms... Stef has nearly finished off the kitchen and bathroom, and then it'll be ready. Freya thinks it looks great.

Floored

Here's a pic of the suite with its flooring, and the kitchen half installed.

Baby's first Canada Day, and a moving day is set

Canada day has marked the end of my work and the start of proper summer. To be fair, May was gorgeous, but June was a washout. Now July is looking set to be sunny. I hear that being heavily pregnant in really hot weather is a b*&^h, so I will count myself lucky.

I'm waking up every day at 3 or 4am these days, when I stumble around in the dark having 'first breakfast' and reading a novel for a few hours before my hips will let me get back to sleep again. Fun! So it's nice not to have to be at my desk at 8am.

Exercise has become fairly ridiculous. I've taken a few aquasize classes, which is laughable as 'exercise' but good for just getting joints moving and taking the weight off for a bit. Also prenatal yoga is a good laugh. I should take a video of me trying to do what the instructions say (touch your toes... ha!) and post to youtube, if I feel like adding some humour to the world. Maybe not today.

The doctors tell me she is 'engaged', which means she's head-down and getting ready to exit. The whole process of 'dropping' comes with a whole new set of twinges and funny feelings, which is highly entertaining.

Meanwhile, the house is coming along slowly but surely. Stef has the floor in, and half of the kitchen. The bathroom is still empty, but should be started any day now. Of course there have been a whack of annoying problems...
1) The spray foam insulation poked right through the walls to the exterior, making the outside too 'lumpy' to install the siding. Stef had to crack the whip to get them to fix that... but eventually they did.
2) The regular batt insulation in the attic was too skinny to properly fit between the wooden framing, so that it tended to slide down the slope overnight. Again, cracking the whip made them swap it for a slightly wider set of batting.
3) The stain Stef has been using to paint the cedar 'belly band' (the wooden strips that run around the outside of the house to visually separate one floor from another) -- Sikkens Cetol SRD oil-based natural stain -- has been discontinued, and we don't have enough to finish the job. Ooops. No biggy. We'll either scrape up another tin from somewhere, or pick something that vaguely matches. I mean, really, who cares that much?
4) The crummy weather in June has held up the painting of the siding, in our lovely 'cushing green'. Now it's sunny that should get back on track - if Stef can find good, cheap people to do the painting.
5) we've run through a heap of temporary workers who didn't work out for one reason or another... one only lasted a day. It's so hard to find good people... especially when you have to tell them they might lose their work any day now for a couple of weeks, while the foreman goes on paternity leave.

Given all that, we've abandoned dreams of moving in before baby and I have the spare room in our current place kitted out as a nursery. We've given our notice for 1 Sept, so that's the drop-dead deadline for moving.