Oh boy... Here we go again!!!

Well... Remember in my last post I had mentioned we wanted to be 100% finished this house by mid-May? There's a perfectly good reason for that... We're doing it all over again!

That's right, we're building another house.

Are we crazy?! I think so!

We love this house. We love Lucan. We love our property. But we don't love the distance between the girls' school and home. So we want to move closer. Right now we're about 25 minutes door-to-door. The drive to and from school isn't bad. The issue is when the girls have activities after school, but not until 5:30 or 6:00pm. We don't have time to come home in between and we end up just killing time in the car... for hours! And I don't know how we'd even deal with the distance when one is in high school and the other one is still in elementary school with two different start times. We hadn't really thought all of this through unfortunately. 

So after LOTS of thought and lots of tears, we've decided to sell our pride and joy. 

The first few weeks after our decision didn't feel real, but now that we've posted our house for sale on Facebook and people are coming through it, it has started to sink in. I know we're making the smartest decision for our family, but it's going to be really hard to leave this place. I thought of every square inch of this house in great detail and spent so much time and energy on planning our perfect home. 

I'm sure the next family that moves in here will enjoy everything there is to offer, so that makes it sting a little less. 

When I start feeling sad about selling our house, I try to think ahead of yet another amazing country property. Except this one is way closer to school!

 

 

Here we are... nervous and excited smiles!

I'll fill you in on more, once we know more! We're still working on floor plans and site plans and we're actually excited to do this all over again!

Finishing Touches... Finally!

I wish I had about 8 months worth of work on the house to write about... But we've been moving at a snail's pace! Maybe even slower than a snail. 

The weather is warming up, so we're diving right in. 

Over the winter we did manage to install our backsplash. We decided to go with a 3"X11" faux marble tile with white grout. I love it! We have purchased all of our tile, including this one, from Tile Town on Hamilton Road. They have such cool products, great prices and the staff is so friendly and helpful! If you've never been, go! They even lend their tools for free when you buy tile. 

 

We had a change of plans about halfway through which resulted in a tile shortage and some waiting until we could get more. 

Initially we thought we would just keep the backsplash at the same height all the way around, even the wall without upper cabinets. But once I saw the tiles up, it just looked unfinished to me. So we decided to order more tile and take the backsplash all the way up to the ceiling! 

 

 

 

 Excuse the mess!

And here it is! Finally finished!

 

 

We're so thrilled with how everything has turned out. 

I also finally installed the last of the closet organizers... No more digging through garbage bags of towels and linens! It's only been a year. 😂

The mudroom is close(r) to completion as well. It's organized! 

 

I'd like to build, or maybe buy, lockers to hide the upstairs laundry rough-ins like these...

 

Image courtesy of www.ana-white.com

 

Of course Jake's detached garage took up a bit of time as well. It's not done yet either... But it's close!

 

 

We've even put up a few pictures on the wall! Haha! This is huge actually. We worked so hard on those walls that it's hard to put holes in them!

 

The plan for the next 2 weeks is to tackle the lawn and our huge list! We need to re-do our front landscaping thanks to two puppies. One digs holes while the other eats plants, including a whole tree!! She chomped it down like she was a beaver! Hopefully we can get it back looking like this, ASAP! 

 

Our bedrooms and bathrooms are all done too. We had been putting off caulking and painting trim. Cleaning primed only trim is such a pain. Everything sticks to it! So this weekend I painted, and painted and painted! 

Rylan's room:

 

Tatum's room:

 

Our room:

Master Bath:

 

 

Girls' bathroom:

 

 

We worked all weekend and finally decided to call it quits when the sun went down!

 

We want the house to be 100% complete by mid-May... Because it's going to be for sale! 😬😬😬

Details coming soon!! 

No Pain(t), No Gain

Well, we're in the thick of it now. 

We decided to take on the chore of painting the entire house ourselves. We got some absolutely ridiculous quotes and just couldn't justify forking out that much money for something we're capable of doing on our own. 

Thankfully we have been SUPER fortunate to have great friends and family to come help. It doesn't hurt that they're actually excellent painters! 

A special shout out goes to Tracy for tackling both girls' rooms. They were the trickiest rooms in the house thanks to the turquoise ceiling and the wall paint colour that is just a touch off from the primer colour. But they turned out great and look professionally done!

We are so appreciative of all the help! 

So far we have used 20 gallons of primer, 6 gallons of ceiling paint and 3 gallons of wall colour. The ceilings are all done and we just have the walls left in all rooms except for the bedrooms. We're getting closer!

Hopefully we can get the trim and doors painted early this week so our finish carpenter can get started. 

Doors all ready to be painted dark gray. 

Everyone is super sore and achy from hours and hours of painting. We'll all be glad when this part is over!

Our tiling is all finished. It turned out so well. 

Main bath floor and tub surround. 

Ensuite shower. 

We had someone come out to measure for glass doors this week too. They should be installed in the next 2 weeks. 

Our garage doors should be getting installed Monday. I can't wait to see how the front of the house looks without plywood for garage doors! 

I wish our hardwood was ready... That's the only thing holding us up right now. As long as they're 100% ready to be installed by February 17th, we should be fine. Our installer is scheduled to come from the 18th-22nd. Fingers crossed! 

Wooden want anything else!

Our hardwood floors are in the kiln! Well half of them! They'll be there for at least a week, maybe even 2 depending on the moisture content. 

I went to see them while they are drying. I already love them!

The flooring manufacturer is going to make us up a few samples out of these pieces here

Once they're dry, they'll be tongue and grooved and ready for install!  We plan to do a very light sanding. We want to keep as much of the age spots and patina as possible, and then finish with a clear coating to protect them. 

The other half of our floors are here:

Still on the barn! They'll be coming down next week and going into the kiln too. I love the idea of using reclaimed wood. I am by no means a treehugger, I throw the occasional pop can into the garbage, oops! But I do have a fascination and love for old things. I am amazed at the construction and level of detail given the lack of modern technology. 

We had a few big beams milled into flooring too... Here are some of the pieces. There's a few pieces of cedar mixed in there that aren't ours. 

Anyway... That's the update on our floors. I plan to go watch/help and take pictures of the actual milling and tongue and grooving process. More on that later!

  

Interior/exterior update

I struggled to come up with a catchy title for this one...

The house is coming along! 

The siding is 2/3 done... 

All those shakes we stained are up too

I'm so glad we went for real cedar. The colours are amazing. We plan to stain the timbers a bit darker in the spring. We used the same stain for both, but they're two different species so we were expecting to have to redo it. We just wanted them stained and protected for the winter.  

Our back timbers SHOULD be up in the next few days. But I've been saying that for weeks it seems...

On the inside, all the mudding and sanding of drywall is done. So once we clean all the dust off the ceiling and walls, we'll be ready for primer and paint! 

Jake bought a sprayer so hopefully it will move things along faster! We want to paint our basement ceiling/floor trusses black eventually so it will definitely be needed for that!  I found this picture on Houzz and we both love the idea. 

On to even more exciting progress... We have some floors and tub/shower surround up!

This is our mudroom floor. We bought these tiles for $0.30/tile at Home Depot. We decided to lay them on a diagonal/diamond pattern to make them more interesting and I'm pretty happy with them!

Our ensuite shower so far...

I love this little alcove! I feel like I'll need to buy some fancy shampoo now. 

The floor in our main bathroom turned out so well. We absolutely love it. Now we're considering using the same, only black, for our basement laundry room. But that's a DIY project for down the road. 

I'm excited for it all to be grouted. Our installer said he'll be done by Wednesday. Yay!