Demos & Renos

I thought it might be time for a quick update on where we are with the house. 

Lots and lots of demo!!! 

Our dumpster is pretty much full and we'll be sending it back on Wednesday. 

Now we can't wait to put it all back together and move above ground! 

Pretty much everything has been picked and/or ordered and is just patiently waiting for its turn to be installed. 

 

We have spent more money at Benjamin Moore than we even care to know. 

EVERYTHING is getting a fresh coat of paint. Bye-bye drunk tank pink walls and cream trim! Even the ceilings are cream! 

The biggest, noticeable improvement so far is outside. We painted the bright orange garage doors to colours we think suit the house and shop better. We still have the paint the shutters and man doors, but we seem to be working on every nice day. 

 

 

 

 

We've also painted the sidelights on the front door - Benjamin Moore Hale Navy (thanks for the recommendations!)

 

We were going to keep the original door and paint it navy as well, but neither of us really like the full glass panel. So we ordered a new one! It will be windowless and fiberglass so we can stain it a nice dark walnut brown. I think it will look pretty good and suit the house perfectly. 

Right now we are using pretty much all 4 bathrooms for various things. We shower and brush our teeth in the powder room. Jake shaves in the ensuite, and the girls' bathroom is still under construction so it's basically just a room with a functioning toilet. And then the basement bathroom is the one we use at night while we're down there. 

We had grand plans for this house but we also have a semi-strict budget in mind so we've been doing a lot of repurposing as opposed to replacing. It actually makes me even more proud when we can transform something old into something we love. 

In the girls' bathroom we painted the vanity black, added a new counter top, new light, sink, faucet, toilet (because the old one is cream!) and floors. Oh and of course paint! 

 

 

The knobs are off of an old dresser that I had redone a few years ago and the shower will remain cream and hidden behind a shower curtain! The walls will be turquoise, just to brighten things up a bit for the girls!

And we're going to use the same vinyl sheet flooring that we used in the laundry room. 

Speaking of girls... I had made decorating their room a priority so that they didn't get too bored with the whole renovation thing. 

Here's Rylan's room:

 

 

Trim and doors still need to be painted. 

The dots are decals from Urbanwalls and I am thrilled with how this room turned out! 

She really wanted a purple and black room. I just couldn't paint her walls black. So black dots it is. Her closet doors and inside of her bedroom door will be black too. Good compromise! She loves it, so I'm happy. 

And Tatum's room:

 

Trim and doors are in desperate need of painting in here too! Her sprinkles came from Urbanwalls as well. Her room also didn't have an overhead light. But it does now. She wanted the chandelier that was in Rylan's room originally. We painted it yellow to give it a bit of an update. It looks cute! Pictures don't really do it justice. 

 

We had an electrician here last week to add pot lights all over and move a couple of other lights. The kitchen, living room, our room, hallways... it's so much brighter and nicer already! 

 

That lovely matching ceiling fixture is now resting comfortably in our dumpster! 

 

There's plenty more to do! We're trying to get the 100 million staples out of the floors (HUGE thanks to Jake's mom for giving up a big head start on this project!). We want to have the entire house painted and ready for floors by mid-November. Wish us luck!!

We're in! ... the basement.

Well... we're here! We have taken possession of our forever house (we mean it this time) and couldn't be more excited!

We have settled into the basement while we work away at the main floor. We plan to be done by Christmas... but I REALLY hope it's sooner than that. Although living in the basement this time around is a lot nicer than our last 10 week episode of basement dwelling in Lucan. This one is finished! And there's even rooms! Yippee!

The girls have their beds set up in one room, Jake and I have our bed tucked away in a little corner. We have a living room with a TV and a full bathroom. The kitchen upstairs is still fully functional, and will remain that way until everything else is done. So it's really not too bad. 

The only thing we don't have downstairs is laundry. So we made redoing the laundry room our biggest priority. And it's almost done!

Here is what the laundry room looked like before we moved in:

The first thing we did was remove the baseboards and paint. Everything "white" in this house is actually cream or ivory... so every square inch of this house needs to be painted. We like things white and clean!

 

 

You can see the ivory/cream/practically yellow trim really well in this picture. 

We decided to keep the built in ironing board just in case we stop only wearing jeans and t-shirts. Kidding... we didn't have any 2x4s or drywall here at the time or else that thing would have been gone! Maybe one day. 

Next we tackled the floor. We found this awesome sheet vinyl at Lowe's with a gray hexagon pattern. It was an inpulse buy, and it turned out great! We went looking for tile but that would have meant ripping up the old vinyl and subfloor on top of tiling. With 100 million projects on the go and a dwindling sock and underwear supply, we went for it. 

 

This was our first time ever laying sheet vinyl so we were both kind of nervous. But it was super easy and it's really stuck down. Success!

A few moves ago (ugh) I had bought 2 cabinets for my laundry room that never made it up on the wall.  So I was pretty determined to get these things up after moving them 3 times.

 

Since the washer and dryer are so deep and high, I wanted to be able to actually use the cabinets so we attached 2x4s (2 thick) first to bring the cabinets out from the wall. This was also the only easy way I could be sure we had everything mounted to studs. Funny thing about finding studs. Laser levels don't work. Even if you buy $15 worth of baterries for it after searching for an open store on a long weekend. Weird. 😜

We eventually found our stud finder and shortly after found the studs. 

 

 

The only thing left to do is add baseboards and paint the trim around the door and closet. It feels good to have 1 room (almost) done and it feels even better wearing clean clothes! 

 

Now onto the girls' rooms so they can stay excited about this house while we live in the basement!

A Giant Weight has been Lifted!

After 2 short days on the market, we have sold our temporary house! What a relief! 

We actually had multiple offers and ended up choosing the one with the least conditions. 

We needed to close this house quickly in order to make life easier for when we move into our forever home.

I always thought a multiple offer scenario as a seller would be the ideal situation. Now after experiencing it, it's terrible. We felt so bad for the people who we didn't choose. They sent nice notes, some with pictures, saying why they wanted to buy our house. I wish I had more houses to sell them!

 

Here are a few "before and after" pics of our temporary house:

Before 

 

After

 

Before

 After

Before

After 

 

 

Before

 

After

 

Before

After

 

 

Our house in Lucan has officially closed as of yesterday and we don't get our forever house until October 3rd. For the first time in over 2 years, we literally have NOTHING to do!! We can laze around with no guilt. What a feeling!

We might even watch a movie tonight! Haha

We're pretty excited for our new house now that we don't have to worry about having 2 houses to pay for. We're going to put together a game plan for when we take possession so we can get what needs to be done done as quickly as possible! Stay tuned!

A new dream... That involves even more dirt!

We have abandoned ship. Aborted the mission. Given up. The Upper Thames River Conservation Authority has won. 

We will NOT be building our new dream home on 10 acres on the Thames River. 👎🏻

Shocked? Us too. 

We had made 'being able to build' a condition on the purchase of the property, so we were able to back out without penalty. Phew!

Although we have spent over $5,000 on house plans, site plans and we even applied for a minor variance with the municipality. Ugh... I guess it's better than being stuck owning a very expensive camp site!?

We've actually changed courses a little bit. The property on the river was 10 acres of beautiful trees and of course the river. But it was also quite hilly and had a pretty steep slope, so although beautiful, the land was kind of useless. 

We've decided to shift our focus to more of a hobby farm. Jake wants to have some goats and sheep, the girls are dying for ponies and I want a gigantic garden and lots and lots of bees and chickens! 

We've been looking at farms and acreages for the past couple of months and are happy to report that we have found our forever home! Yay!

 

The house is absolutely beautiful, from the outside! The inside needs a bit of an update. It was built in 1995 so there are pink carpets throughout along with beautiful green accents. Nothing a little elbow grease and a few gallons of paint can't fix. 

Although we're looking forward to updating the inside, the majority of our focus is going to be outside on the acerage surrounding the house. 

We have plans to have a few acres of permaculture orchard as well as a large pumpkin patch, chicken coop, pasture for some goats, sheep, and ponies and of course a giant garden my grandpa Brand would be proud of. 

We've chosen the name Root & Rooster for our farm and are working on designing the layout of the orchard. We need to get the trees planted as soon as possible because they will take a few years to reach a mature harvest. 

Wondering what permaculture is? It's a form of sustainable agriculture that works WITH nature as opposed to trying to get nature to do what we want with chemicals and modifications. It will produce the best food you've ever tasted!

Once we're up and running, you'll just have to come see for yourself! 

Temporary Solutions

I am pleased to announce that Jake is happy with the house "we" picked to live in for the next year! Yay!

By the time he got home from camping I had not only bought us a house but had already planned all of our remodeling activities :)

I know, I know, we've got enough to do. But I can't help but put our own stamp on this house to really make it feel like home. For a year. 

First things first, that kitchen. Eeek. We've been seriously spoiled with our current house. We have more drawers and cupboards than we even need. There are even a few empty ones! We'll certainly be downsizing! The new kitchen is a small galley kitchen with very little cupboard and counter space. And it's oak (Pronounce O-Ack for my Yellow Platoon peeps 😜). We thought about just repainting them but the door design just isn't my style. So we're planning on keeping the cupboard boxes, painting them and replacing the door and drawer fronts to a shaker style. 

New counter tops, sink and an updated backsplash should bring this little space into 2016! 

 

We are planning on moving the fridge for a little bit more counter space and building a large pantry for functionality in the "eat in area" since there is a full dining room as well. 

 

If we were staying here, and if I got the house for our original budget, I'd be tempted to take down a few walls. But we're trying to spend as little as possible.

The rest is just a little painting here and there. It's mostly neutral colours already, so that's a plus for me.  We've had our fair share of painting already and there will be plenty more in our future. 

I'd like the update the front of the house a tiny bit too. Nothing too drastic. Replace the horizontal siding with shakes, beef up the posts and maybe at a bit of craftsman touches to the peaks. 

 

We have to move the fence back a bit too to fit our vehicles in the driveway... 

So that will get a little update by default. 

Let me say, city living isn't really our thing! 

We have way too much stuff!!

We actually spent the last 4 days purging. Jake took 300kg to the dump, and there is still more! We're planning on having a massive garage sale in the next week or so too. 

It feels good to have less. Really good! 

It should hopefully make moving twice in the next year easier. 😬😬😬

So there you are, all up to speed! We get the house September 1st so there likely won't be much to report until then! I hope!

Hurry Up & Wait

The blog has been pretty quiet these days, but we certainly haven't been!

I'm just going to give a quick update on where we're at with house stuff. The last few weeks have been pretty stressful, and I didn't want to report only negative stuff, so I waited until I had something positive to share.

This would be the world's longest blog post if I wrote it all out, so point form it is! 

- House Plans: they're almost complete. Our timber frame guy and house designer got together today to work out some last minute details. Yay!

- Site Plan: Complete!! So now we know where the house will be on the property. The only issue is that we had to have the house set back 20m from the lot line in order to accommodate the slope/walkout basement. 

The bylaw is a minimum of 25m set back for Rural Residential properties. This means we need to apply for a minor variance. Just one more thing to do!

- Minor Variance: We've applied to Thames Centre. It was a pretty straight forward application asking what we're requesting and why. Unfortunately for us their next meeting for this type of thing isn't until September 19th. So now we wait some more. And this puts us into a winter build again which we said we would never do again. So... Now what?

- Now What: Where are we going to live?!

Our current house closes in 9 weeks, our new house won't be ready until a year from now if we wait till spring to start... Eek! Not the greatest situation to be in. 

So we decided to buy another house for the year. We thought about renting, but it seemed like such a waste of money. And we need every penny! 

Jake has been away camping for the past 3 days without cell reception, so I bought this house on my own. Talk about stressful! We had set a maximum budget, and Jake did have a chance to go through it before he left, but things never play out as you plan. I went over budget (oops!) and I'll find out tomorrow when he comes home if it was a good move or not. I'm sure he'll be fine with it. We just wanted to make sure that we didn't over pay so when we sell in a year, we're not out a bunch of money. 

I sent him this so he'll find out we got a house when he finally gets cell reception!

 

(Rylan is at Girls Rock Camp this week ☺️)

It's a cute little house in the neighbourhood of the girls' school. It will be nice to drive less for the next year. And the girls can walk to/from school!

But if anything a year in the city will REALLY make us appreciate 10 acres in the country even more!

Last but not least... 

- Upper Thames River Conservation Authority: We dropped off our application last week. The next day I realized that we never left a cheque for the application fees so back we went the following day to drop it off. 

Turns out we got ourselves a little impromptu meeting with the "thou shall not build" officer. She told us that we need to have all of these studies redone and resubmitted and they only charge $1000 a piece to review them. Ugh. 

Anyone and everyone we've spoken to about all of this thinks it's absolutely nuts that they're asking us for all of this. The property is zoned for residential use. We're not severing it, or changing the zoning. We just want to build a house! So frustrating. And annoying. I could go on venting my frustrations about the UTRCA for days... But I'm trying to focus on the positive. 

The previous owners really pissed them off, and now I think we're taking the brunt of it. 

At least now there isn't as big of a rush, we've got somewhere to live! 

That is such a huge relief. Maybe now I'll start packing! 

Step 1 is STRESSFUL!

Building a new house is a lot of chicken before the egg scenarios.

But first let me tell you a little bit about the place we'd like to call home...

If we ever crack the mysterious chicken before the egg dilemma, "home" will be 10 acres of mature forest on 700' of the Thames River between London and St Marys. 

The property is absolutely amazing and everything we've ever wanted, and more!

 

The trouble with this property is that its beautiful landscape and unbelievable setting makes development a bit of a challenge. 

We will need the approval of the Upper Thames River Conservation Authority (UTRCA) which looks like it could be a bit of a hurdle. And if you're 5' tall like me, hurdles are hard!!

There is a bit of history with our new property. The previous owners had severed it off of their farm in 1998. Their intent was to sever the severed parcel into two 5 acre lots and sell them. During the LONG drawn out process, the owner got sick and decided to stop. But also during the process the UTRCA asked for an Environmental Impact Study... What is that? It's a large document that either supports or discourages the impact development would have on the land. Did you know that someone's job is to sit out in nature and count species? Who knew?! Sign me up!

What did the Environmental Impact Study say for the property we're hoping to live on for the rest of our lives (for real this time)? It says we have "Significant Woodlot containing the near extinct Butternut trees and threatened muscle and snake species."

So now we need to show the UTRCA that these things won't be affected or disturbed while we build a house here. We really don't want to disrupt any wildlife here, it's what we love about the property! 

But it's unfortunately inevitable. We will need to remove a few trees in order to build the house and put in the septic tank/bed. 

We met with the Woodland Conservation Officer this week, and he didn't see any issues with what we wanted to do. Yay!

Then once we have the approval of the UTRCA, we'll apply to Thames Centre for a building permit and then we can start!

Our current house is officially sold and will close mid-September. We need to get moving!

 

 The girls checking out their new backyard!

There are acres of Sugar Maples which means Maple Syrup!! There is even a (dilapidated) sugar shack on the property with all the equipment needed to make our own syrup... It just needs a good cleaning... And maybe some new siding. And the roof patched up. We'll be making syrup in no time 😬. 

 

We've been working on house plans over the past few weeks and are ALMOST there! Just a few revisions left to do and I think we'll be all set! I feel a bit rushed this time around, so I really hope the floor plan flows as nicely as our current house. 

Here's a sneak peak of the front... This was our first drawing. It's a bit different now!

This house will be a Timber Frame hybrid with Structure Insulated Panels... More on that later! 

Basically it will have exposed beams, cathedral pine ceilings and hopefully a relaxed cottagey atmosphere!