A tour inside

Well, I haven't posted for... years. But here's a little peek at what it looks like inside. It's mostly done (no master bathroom yet, no stairs up the back, no window trim or backsplash tile). But we're loving living in it.

Floored

The carpets are in! All from Home Depot, which did a nice special on installation (flat fee no matter how big the room/house).

It looks fab. Now Stef and John are working on bathrooms, and... we might actually move in this summer!

Photo special

I have failed to post any pics for ages, so here's a whole bunch.

Coming in the front door


The kitchen (haven't decided on a countertop yet)


The dining area


The living room, with wood burning stove


View from the living room sofa-to-be


My office / kids' playroom, already being used as an office 2 days a week while Stef does Daddy Day Care!


Going upstairs, with skylight and new pony wall instead of balistrade


Freya's yellow room


Spare bedroom


Master bedroom (the bath will be moved!)


View from the 'library' on the main floor


View from the master bathroom toilet. Seriously.

Spring has sprung

But no grass has 'ris'. Sadly we're now months behind schedule (it was suposed to be FINISHED, inside and out, by the end of 2012. Ha!) But it is looking great. The kitchen is in -- black cabinets from Ikea. And we have some nice flooring for everywhere. For the record (sorry this is boring):

- Main floor: engineered click-together red oak from King of Floors (1000 sqft)
- Kitchen floor: tile from Ames, Burnaby. Discontinued 17"x17" black speckled. $2.50/sqft (80 sqft)
- Kitchen backsplash: tile from Factory Outlet, Burnaby. subway shapes. Italian white stripes. $4.59/sqft (24 sqft)
- powder room and laundry floor: tile from Factory Outlet, Burnaby. 13"x13" dark grey. $1.99/sqft
- upstairs bathroom: tile from Factory Outlet, Burnaby. 13"x13" light grey. $1.99/sqft
- carpet from Home Depot: 'city lights' deep pile for the playroom; light grey speckle for the upstairs. roughly $2.10/sqft

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.

Let there be light

Thanks to a gift coupon from my brother Chris and Rebecca (and Home Depot), we now have lights for the suite! The walls have been painted, the light switches work, the heaters are in... it's starting to look livable. Next up: kitchen and bathroom. It's a real race. The baby is due on 13 July. I reckon if she's late we might actually be in before then :)







Here also are some pics of our builder hard at work in the 'kitchen', and the funky ceiling in the suite's bedroom, where the stairs to upstairs cut into the wall.

Bath and switch

So here's a funny story... We go to the store, pick out a bath, buy the bath, the name of the bath on the box matches the bath we wanted, and we pay the right price for the bath we want. We bring it home. The builder (Stef, I think) puts it in. A week passes. My parents come up. I peel back the cardboard to reveal our.... uh, that's not the right bath.

After much confusion, we have established that the 'kidney shaped' tub is no longer being made, and instead we have been given the next model. Apparently it's worth $200 more than we paid for it, so I guess I won't complain!

Day off for flying

In the midst of all that shopping, we took a day to relax in the sun (me) and go paragliding (Stef). Here we are at the Mackenzie launch. I just took pics and then drove the car down, did the crossword and took a nap. Stef stayed in the air for about 4 hours. Little Freya didn't seem to mind the bumpy road!

Shopping spree

On Saturday 5 May we had an epic shopping spree day. First stop Rona for a shower head for the master bath (a lovely 'rain head' that will make it feel like you're standing in a spring shower). I just hope there's enough pressure to get shampoo out. If not, we can always change the head later. We've picked out matching taps for the Roman tub and sink, but they didn't have them in stock.

Next stop 'King of Floors', the hilarious shop in Surrey advertized by a 'king' in full regalia with a miniature dog (see pic). Cheesy place. Great prices. We picked up an awesome discontinued laminate floor for the suite (which, by my knife-dropping tests, seems indestructable) that looks like Cherry wood, for just 69c per square foot (!!!). We also found a real Brazilian jatoba (cherry) engineered click-fit board for our house, on sale from 6.99 to 4.99 / sq ft. It's in budget, lovely, a great colour with a little bit of 'distressing' done to it to hide scratches and dings, and random lengths to make the room look nice and un-regulated. But I'm a bit worried about the fate of the Amazon, so I'm trying to check to see whether it's Forest Stewardship Council certified. If not, it is a very thin layer of wood on top... but I'm not sure that's really good enough.

Next stop IKEA for our suite's kitchen. We picked out cupboards in Beech, which match the lighter streaks in the new floor, and a 2-compartment sink.

On Monday I went trawling for carpets, tiles, and appliances (whew!). Looks like it'll either be Home Depot or BRICK for appliances. Both are putting together quotes for me for a ridiculous haul of: 2 stacking washer/dryers; 2 fridges; 2 stoves; 2 dishwashers; 2 microwaves. Should come out to something like $8,000!!!

We already picked up bathtubs the weekend before... a 'Romance' tub for the master suite (lovely deep elegant sucker) and a 'peanut' tub for the kids' bathroom - so that, one day, when there are 2 kiddies, they can each have their own end of the tub and fight over who gets the taps :)

That's enough decision-making for now.

Meanwhile our doctor in Squamish, Louise Martin, who'll be delivering little Freya, says all looks well. The baby is lying sideways at the moment (across my belly, rather than with her head down), but there are weeks yet for her to sort herself out. If she doesn't, then apparently they send me to a specialist to try and massage/coax her into place. And if THAT doesn't work then we'll be c-section bound, but the chances of that now are slim (2% or so).

Pour it in

After the insulation was finished (horrah!) the next step was pouring a 1.5 inch layer of concrete flooring onto the main floor. We did this to help provide sound insulation between the suite and us, and the garage and us. Stef was understandably nervous -- you can't really watch the concrete going down, as there are few vantage points to watch from, and if it winds up bumpy or slanted then it's a nightmare. But all went well -- apparently it's smooth as a baby's bottom, and a lot more level than one.

Sound insulation is an interesting thing. The concrete, apparently, is excellent at damping out air-transmitted noise (like music or voices), but does nothing to stop footfalls from resonating through our floor down into the suite below. On the garage side of the house, this isn't important: we only want to stop the noise of drilling, sawing and pounding in the workshop from wafting upwards into my office. No one cares if the sound of me typing / throwing my computer to the floor in frustration (or more likely little Freya throwing her toys about) penetrates into the 'quiet sanctum' (ha ha) of the garage. On the suite side, however, though we are now protected from noise by them (unless they dance on their ceiling), they are not yet protected from noise by us. Stef plans to suspend their ceiling on little metal brackets that apparently helps to deal with this. We don't want to be too too precious about our tenants, but from experience we know that sound transmission can be the thing that drives away otherwise-perfectly-good paying customers.

Spray it on

As of 5 April, the insulation team has arrived and started to spray insulating foam into the walls. Stef is very pleased; it makes the whole house seem more solid, he says. The spray insulation is more expensive than the old-fashioned batting type, but it doesn't hold water (in case of leaks), won't let through bugs, helps to hold the whole house together, and, surprise, is a better insulator. We're having that in all the outside walls (not the garage), and batting in the attic and garage etc.

Aloha babymoon

It has become tradition for couples to take a 'babymoon' -- one last romantic holiday for two before the baby arrives. So we went to Oahu for 10 blissful days of sun, surf and snorkling, from 20-30 March. Here's me immitating a beached whale:



We stayed in Kailua, a laid-back town of locals without highrises or hotels or beachside cocktails, where Obama apparently spends his holidays. We stayed in a cute little place called D&D's B&B, just a 5 minute walk from Kailua's beach and park (a steal at $75/night). The water was actually cool (bizarrely, it had hailed in Oahu the week before we got there), and the weather too windy for paragliding. But that didn't stop us from getting around and getting a tan.



We saw a macadamia nut farm (Stef is adept at breaking open nuts, as well as at eating free samples), hiked up the hill in Lanakai, the rugged Olomana '3 peaks' hike/rock climb (I only did the first peak, Stef did the second, and we skipped the third, for a 3-hour humid return trip), and the muddy Maunawili falls. We kayaked out from Kailua to Mokolua Island on a wavy day (it was very entertaining watching novices try to land without tipping into the surf), snorkled at Hanauma Bay (which is much less impressive than it used to be, back when they let tourists feed the fish! Now it's far less colourful and popluated by reef fish) and off Electric beach on the west coast (the best spot for snorkling by far -- fish are attracted to the warm water outflow pipe, which has become an artificial reef), swam with dolphins from Ko Olina resort (expensive at $120 each but worth it), and generally mooched about the beach, shops, and highways of Oahu. A highlight for Stef was Bookends, a new and used book shop in the heart of Kailua (every restaurant seemed to be locatable in terms of 'steps from Bookends'), where he found a book he'd been looking for for 10 years!

Now it's back to the grindstone... more literally for stef than for me.

Pregnancy highlights from the trip:
Freya is kicking like a boxer now, the little fighter! Sleeping became a real pain, with hip ache waking me every few hours and getting me up at the crack of dawn. But by the end of the holiday that had much improved. Long flights with a big belly are not comfy -- those seats are a pain in the back, literally. Otherwise, Freya caused no problems and enjoyed her time in the sun.