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! 

 

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!! 

Just a little update!

Oh heeey! Where have we been? Enjoying our house! Is it done? Nope!

I was really hoping that this house would be 100% complete by now, but hey, the weather is nice and we just worked our butts off to get the house to where it is now... We'll get back to working on it this winter when the weather is crappy! :)

So what's left?

Fireplace mantle: Our kitchen guy is doing it, and he's swamped. I made the mistake of saying we weren't in a rush. We aren't, but it would be nice to have that done! 

Here's the drawing. It will be white to match our kitchen cabinets with a reclaimed wood piece on the top. 

Trim: our trim is all just primed. So it will need 2 coats of paint. That is definitely a winter project! EVERY piece of trim. Baseboards, window casings, door casings... Good thing we didn't go for any crown moulding!!

We are also missing a few pieces of baseboard because we're waiting for the fireplace! 

Stairs: we ran into an issue with the treads on the stairs so it's taken A LOT more work and time than it was supposed to. 

Darby ran up and down them with muddy paws after I took the plastic off, but before we had a chance to stain/protect them. I thought I cleaned it all up until I put the stain on! You could see 2 paw prints on EVERY STEP!! I debated whether to sand it right away or put another coat of stain on to see if they'd disappear. I went with stain. Let's face it, I'm impatient and I wanted to get the stairs done. Stain was the wrong choice! It just made the paw prints darker. 

So then I sanded Every. Single. Step. 

And started the staining process over again. 2 coats of stain, 3 coats of polyurethane and then I still needed to paint the risers and stringers!

I decided to use Annie Sloan Chalk Paint on the risers. I did that next because I wanted to see how they looked dark. 

I think I chose the wrong order again!  For anyone who has used chalk paint, you know how you're supposed to apply a finishing wax once the paint is dry? Well how do I do that neat enough to only keep it on the risers and not get any wax on the stringers? Because if I get wax on the stringers, then the latex paint for there won't stick! Agh! What have I done?! I've just made more work for myself! So I've left the wax for another day and am slowly tackling the stringers. Slowly. Baby steps. :)

Attic hatch: sounds simple enough? Put a piece of wood and some insulation up there and call it a day. I wish it was that easy! We have the supplies, but we don't have a bazillion foot ladder. No idea how or why, but our garage ceilings are 12' high. We have 12' ladders. But you can't lean them in the attic hole because then they're too short! Story of my life!

We also have so much sh*t in our garage that we can hardly walk around. 

This one is actually at the top of our priority list so hopefully we'll get it done this weekend. 

Cladding the LVL beams: huh? See the yellow horizontal beams? 

Those are all structural and need to be covered in pine boards to look like more timbers. We have been waiting for a quote from the timber guy since May... Despite reminding him, I don't think he's really interested in doing them for us. So we borrowed my dad's table saw, and we're doing it ourselves! 

Landscaping/Grass: I always thought that this was something that could wait. Let's finish the house, get settled in and worry about the yard next year. Well... After living in Weed City for a few months, I realized that that plan was not a good one! 

We have a landscaping company from town coming to put up Armour Stone retaining walls in the back walkout area and 1 in the front garden. Our lot is so sloped! We thought we could get away without retaining walls, but every time it rains, the water runs right down in front of the basement patio doors. Retaining walls it is! I'm kind of excited for them! We chose a dark stone like this:

Grass... Well we seeded the front 1/2 of our property in the spring. It has grown in nicely. But because we have SO many rocks in our yard that we never got a chance to finish picking them and planting seed before the weather got too hot. So we are planning to get the rest of the yard seeded within the next few weeks. They say fall is best for planting grass seed anyway! 

Let's see... What else is there?

Insulation: we had some water issues this spring. 1 was a leaky outside tap that was fixed within hours and the other was from not having our yard graded before the snow melted. So we (ahem Jake) ripped out a lot of the basement insulation as part of a very thorough investigative process ;)

So we need to put that back together. 

We've also submitted plans for a detached garage permit and should be hearing back about that any day now. Because we need more projects!! I think we'll be hiring this one out... 

Now that I've made this list... I feel like I need to go do something! Hopefully I'll have a progress post a little sooner this time :)

Quick Update!

I have been seriously slacking on blog posts lately. We've been frantically trying to tie up loose ends so we can officially move in on Friday!!!  I thought this day would never come!

So what's been happening?

1) We have doors! They took a little longer to install because most of our rough openings were just a hair too small. Great... Oh and our pocket doors were also framed incorrectly so we (by we I mean Dave - our finish carpenter) had to remove drywall, cut studs, change the pocket door frame and repair so we could repaint. Nightmare. 

2) We have trim! It's not 100% done yet but it will be by Thursday!

3) We've started finishing our stairs. It took me a few days to get the GIANT staples out that were holding down some protective plywood. It mostly took me so long because I was frustrated that anyone would intentionally use such an annoying method of securing plywood. I dented a couple stairs trying to get them out too. 

Any that I gave up on got covered in tape and left for another day! 

We conditioned and stained every other stair so we could still get up and down. That was a recommendation from my sister and it was great!

The risers will be black and the stringers will be white. Eventually...

4) The man we bought the barnboard from dropped off some goodies for our house! They came out of century old barns just like our floors... I can't wait to decorate!

There are spade hinges, a door latch, a pulley and a cart thingy. Technical term :)

5) OUR KITCHEN!! It's soooooo close to being completely done. I am SO in love. Don't mind the mess... We have cleaners scheduled for Thursday morning. I just can't clean up construction mess anymore. I've been doing it since October!

6) Our bathroom is taking shape too! The plumber is coming tomorrow to install the sinks and toilet. 

7) Our walk in coset is a work in progress! It took me pretty much an entire day to put it all together and figure out the best design and use of space. I  am quite happy with how it turned out. 

See that gap behind the shelving? I didn't like it... So I cut a piece of pine around the baseboard and am going to paint it white and attach it to the side. I think it will make a huge improvement. 

On the wall straight ahead will be a little white 3 drawer Ikea dresser and above it I'm going to hang a large cork board. I want to hang jewelry from it and also tac up any important piece of paper to avoid clutter! 

On Friday we have two 8'x8'x20' shipping containers full of 2 households of our stuff... Time to unpack and prepare for the worlds largest garage sale! Jake has had his stuff in storage since July! He can't even remember what he has. The girls are dying for all of their stuff and I can't wait for the day when I can stop saying, "it's in storage"! 

Wish us luck!