Cabin - et Fever

It has been cabinet finishing time lately. 

You might not remember the built in cabinets in what was the dining room of the country estate house.  They were butt ugly.  Seriously.  Unfortunately the flooring was installed right up to them but not under them, making removing them somewhat of an inconvenience. 

Okay, no one could argue that these are attractive.  Definitely '70's looking.

This room is going to be our home office, so the two corner units will be able to house books and files.  The big built in leads right into our dining area, so once it is finished, I will sell or repurpose the dining cabinet we have been using and move all the contents into this one.

This project has started and stalled many times.  Before Christmas I got rid of the sliding glass doors and the tracks, and sanded off all the residual glue from the tracks.  Then nothing happened for some time.

A few weeks ago I removed all the hardware, doors and drawers and sanded everything down.  We took the drawers into work with us and used some evening time to paint them there.

Here are the drawers on the workbench being painted.

This weekend we finished the filling and sanding, and I painted the cabinets while Chuckles made a new shelf for each.  In some of these pics you can see the new shelves sitting out front with white primer on them, they are still needing to be painted with the colour which is Monashee Mountains by Sico. 

Above, the big cabinet with the cutting of the new colour.  Below, with the first coat of new colour on.

Above, one of the corner cabinets with the cutting in done, below, with the first coat of colour on.

Below, all the cabinet doors needed one final coat, here they are laid out on floor.

I admit that part of my hesitation in moving the project forward was our colour choice.  I have had the swatch for ages and kept on holding it up to the cabinets and trying to picture them that colour.  Problem is, I am not good at "picturing".  We chose this colour because we wanted them to be darker, and this colour really picks up colour in the backsplash kitchen tiles as well as the living room carpets, so it seemed like a good colour in this transitional space.  But, it's so hard to know for sure until you do the painting, and then, if you don't like it...?

Luckily we both like it a lot!  I think it's going to look fantabulous when it's done.  And the hardware I chose is really pretty too. It's brushed copper, really cool.

 

The new hardware in package, I should have photo's someplace beside the counter top, which has a busy pattern.  Oh well, you get the idea!

 I like it much better than the hardware that's in the kitchen..oh no, does that mean another project?

Soups On

I have been working on a meditation practice.  Just to sit quietly for 15 minutes is hard work, never mind the part about keeping your mind focused inward and pushing away unwanted thoughts.  Most days it feels like the longest 15 minutes of my life, but recently I think I might have felt a glimmer of something.  I think,  I hope?  Who knows, but I'm persisting.

Leo-the-duck-tolling-retriever is still with us, and he has completely embraced the morning meditation practice.  We have established a routine so he now knows that once our walk at the park is over, we go upstairs and meditate.   He charges up the stairs and claims his spot on the floor!  His meditation ends in a long nap. He is deeply stretching and opening one eye to look at me with a “what?  It’s already over?”  look on his face right now. 

The past week has been busy here at work.  It makes the week go by quickly when that's the case, but it's nice to have a quiet day like today has shaped up to be, to catch up on things.   With the filing done and all the books up to date again,  I have started a big pot of red lentil and barley soup in the slow cooker with a huge dollop of Tom Yum soup paste in it for heat and flavor.  It's smelling so good that even though I just finished a tuna wrap, I feel like having a bowl. 

Chuckles has just returned from delivering 10 boxes we are sending to a customer in Norway then picking up more lumber for the storage shed project.  He is going to pre-paint it here at the shop so it's ready to go up on the weekend.

As well as catching my blog up, I have been reading up on a couple that I follow and one of those led me to a new one...you know how it goes in computer-land, each click takes you deeper until hours have passed by.  I am amazed and inspired how many people write daily and make the most mundane of experiences a good read.  It's a combination of their perception and observation skills with a way with words.  Anyway, something to strive for.

 

 

 

 

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

This week the kids have gone back to school, and I am sure many of them will be writing the obligatory "How I Spent My Summer Vacation" essay.  Here is my version!

Just spent another busy weekend at the country estate, finishing up the painting and getting ready for the movers to bring our furniture over this coming Saturday, it seems a good time to recap the progress made on the big life change so far..

The new house front steps

Here's the whole list of what was/is entailed:
Purchase Suitable Property
Sell City House
Move Household to Property
Move Business to Property
Find Tenant for City Warehouse Business Currently Occupies
Enjoy our New Life on Country Estate


Purchase Suitable Property
Mid-May we put in an offer on the country estate, and after a minimum amount of haggling it was ours!  We took possession of it May 31st.

During that same period of time I got sick- the sickest I have been in my adult life - causing me to  miss singing in my choir concert, cancel a trip to Prince George to see my nephew graduate from UNBC and cancel a trip to New York with a group from my choir. I think my body was letting me know that now that the big life change was happening it was TIME TO FOCUS!

So focus I did.

Sell City House
The month of June was spent de-cluttering the city house.  Countless trips to the Sally Ann, packing boxes of stuff we don't use on a daily basis and moving it to the country estate, stripping wallpaper, painting rooms, and painting the whole exterior of the house ourselves!

Chuckles doing the prep work before painting the city house exterior

 In between, I laid on the couch, as I was still not very well, but was determined that I was going to help Chuckles to get the job done!  By the end of June it was completed and we listed the house the first week of July.

Every weekend in July was spent at the country estate.  The weather was marvellous and we cleaned up the gardens, entertained visitors, gutted the barn, and generally busied ourselves outside.  During the week we would be in the city working and doing our best to keep the house clean, polished, mowed and clipped to look good for the open houses each weekend.  Then, Friday night we'd drive out to the country estate spend the weekend and drive back to the city Sunday night. The Monday of the August long weekend, we got the call we had waited for from the realtor.  Not just one, but two offers!  They were presented the next day, and one was clearly the best.  We accepted - house sold!

Move Household to Property
August was all about the interior.  After my initial solo attempt at the painting, Chuckles threw his weight into it and together, in four short weekends (LOL) we have painted nearly the entire interior of the house.

 It is so much better we cannot get over it.

Dark paint

 

Finished in our choice of paint colour!

 

 It was originally Dark Chocolate brown, accented with Marian's Meadow green, colours which completely absorbed the light that came in through the windows, making the house extremely dark and dungeon-like.  We have left the hallway and foyer those colours for now, as the furniture movers will be in next Saturday, and in likelihood there will be some bumps and scrapes on those wall, so we will paint them after the furniture arrives.

So officially Saturday Sept 7th the furniture will be moved and although we still have possession of the city house until Sept 19th, none of our "stuff" will reside there any longer. 

That's where we're at.  Next up is moving the business, but we need to renovate the barn first.  That construction begins on Sept 9th.   Chuckles will be doing some of that work himself, as well as using some contract labour.  Still, we expect it will take a couple of months to complete.

Meanwhile, we will still be working in the city during the week, and at the country estate on the weekends, except  now it will be roughing it in the city and living in comfort on the weekends, the complete reverse of the past three months!  We plan to bring our travel trailer in and park it at a nearby RV park on the river, which will be a nice spot to live, close to work and all amenities, trails and the beach. 

One of our two apple trees, in need of pruning but still producing!

Now that the bulk of the painting is finished, I can turn my attention back to the gardens, the apples that are ripening now, and putting some of that delicious Chilliwack corn into the deep freeze before it's all finished for the season. 

Thanks to all of you who are following my little blog, I sure do enjoy writing it.  It allows me to savor the little experiences that make up my big life change!

Painting, Adventures on Craigslist and other weekend bits and pieces

The painting marathon of the past weekend is behind me and I am here at my desk now, bleary eyed and coffee deprived, stunned at how little was accomplished with so much work.

We painted for 32 hours of the 48 hours that we were at the country estate!  Both of us.  One of us would stop and throw a quick meal together, then we'd eat, take 15 minutes after to digest, and get back at it.  Other than sleeping - 6 hours Friday night and 8 hours Saturday night, bathroom breaks and a daily shower, we painted non-stop!

Oh, I lie. A couple of other things happened too.  (It's all coming back to me now, the coffee must be kicking in.)

Saturday morning Carol, Chelsea and Kathy came by.  They responded to my craigslist ad selling the stall doors and front walls that we stripped out of the barn.  So two weeks ago they came and bought two sets of those, and we helped them load them up, and they poked around and expressed interest in some of the rubber mats that had been on the floor of each stall.  Our intention was to sell them also, but we hadn't got around to putting them on craigslist as we had piles of different sizes and we needed to measure and catalogue them.

It was the rubber mats they came for this week, and between the three of them, they took them all!  Which was a total bonus for us, since we didn't have to list them and deal with the crazies that come out of the woodwork in response to ads on craigslist.  The stall door ad has generated enough of those. 

So it took about 45 minutes of our time to help them load up all the mats and chat with them.  That knocks our painting time down to 31 hours to keep the numbers nice and round.  Later in the day on Saturday, another couple, Mark and his wife, came by to pick up a stall door and front, also responding to the ad.  They came all the way from Washington State!  So another hour or so was spent helping them get that loaded into their horse trailer and learning about their 5 acre property and the work they have been doing there.  That takes the painting time down to 30 hours.

These are the stall doors and wall fronts we are selling on craigslist.  So pretty we had a hard time

 bringing ourselves to take them down!

 

Then I had the most enjoyable Rona shopping experience of my life going to get more of the wall colours we were going to need.  I got the full paint cans, one of each colour we needed and took them to the South Langley Rona which had been Dawson-Brill Lumber when I was growing up.  I turned into the gravel parking lot and parked right in front of the door. As I was pushing a shopping buggy over to my truck, a very enthusiastic young employee came out and asked if he could help.  He loaded my buggy, wheeled it inside, coloured new paint for me and helped me back out to the truck when it was done, all the while chatting pleasantly with me.  I only saw two or three other customers while I was there, each receiving similar attentive service from an employee.  I had to pinch myself.  THIS was RONA??  Where were the lineups?  Where was the crowded parking lot?  Knock another hour off the painting time for the Rona trip - and that was me only, Chuckles was still hard at it while I was gone!

And still, after all that painting, all we got finished was the sunroom.  The rec room is nearly finished, I just need to cut in along the ceiling line and the corners one final coat and then it`s done.  The living/dining room is partially cut in and the ceiling is complete.  What`s done looks spectacular and I know it will all be worth it in the end.  But the end seems a long way off at this point.

Ironworkers Memorial Bridge, courtesy West Vancouver library archive

 



We packed up and drove back to the city around 9pm.  Driving over the Ironworkers bridge, I got that warm feeling in my chest that I get whenever I drive over it - it tells me I`m almost home.  Then, with a jolt I realized that in a month or so, the bridge will never signify that to me again. 

Yikes!  Change IS hard.

Sky High Skylights

Well my painting project got off to a rocky start. 

The ceilings in the house at the country estate need painting badly.  So obviously that has to be done before tackling the walls.

I decided that the best place to start was with the skylights, of which there are four.  Four tall skylights.  I'm tall, but they are really, really tall.  Sky high, or so it seems when you are teetering up on a ladder, in a narrow passageway with hot sun beaming on your head, and the treetops visible through the skylight (if you are brave enough to open your eyes!).

After breakfast I asked Chuckles if he could help me, so he got the extension ladder from the garage and set it up in the foyer skylight, the lowest of the four.  Good place to begin.  He showed me how to work the ladder, where to set the rung so it was secure, and how to test it before ascending. 

 

Ready to paint the first of the four skylights! 

It took me a while to figure out which parts to paint by hand, what I could reach with the roller from the ladder and what I could reach with the roller attached to a pole and to overcome my fear that the ladder was going to slip out from under me.  Okay - I never overcame that fear.  I just persevered through it.  Unfortunately, on one of the skylight walls, a bit of the popcorn ceiling peeled off when I used the roller on it, but I was able to paint over the spot with the brush and it looks fine.

After an hour, I was done, and moved the whole process into the master bedroom, where the roof is higher, hence, so is the skylight.  Gulp. 

I set up the ladder.  Positioned the rung correctly.  Tested it for non-slip.  Climbed up with my paint pot in one hand and brush in the other.  Was unable to reach the very edge of the glass without climbing higher.  Could not make myself do it.  Climbed down and gave myself a good talking to. 
Didn't work.  Chuckles came in the house, so I told him I was nervous about climbing higher on the ladder.  He climbed to the top, pronounced it safe, went back outside and started up the lawn tractor. 

I can honestly say I hated him in that moment.

Following his lead, I climbed to the step I needed to be on to reach the edge of the glass.  I was actually wimpering.  I was up there, but paralyzed, I couldn't dip into my paint pot and begin.  I climbed back down to assess the situation.  It occurred to me that I needed to free up one hand to be able to hold onto the ladder, that would help.  So, I jury-rigged a bucket tied to the ladder to put my paint pot in, which meant every time I needed to dip my brush I had to go down two rungs, dip, then back up two rungs, paint.  But it worked.  And that was just to get the hand painting done around the edge and down the seams.  Then I used the roller from a lower rung.  However, even more popcorn texture peeled off in this skylight, so it took more work to repair/disguise it.

An hour and a bit later, I moved the entire production into the main bath where the going got tricky.  The skylight is over the bathtup, so I had to finagle the ladder around tub and toilet, as well as covering all kinds of uneven surfaces with drop cloths.  Finally done with that, and knowing that this skylight was even higher than the bedroom skylight, I decided to give myself a break and start with the roller rather than the hand painting.  I hoped I would be able to get so close to the top with the roller that I might not even need to hand paint!  But disaster struck.  First swipe with the roller peeled off a whole bunch of popcorn texture. 

 

It's hard to see, but the popcorn texture is all peeled off above the ladder.

At which point I packed it in.  I just had to walk away, and it was lunchtime.  Over lunch I told Chuckles how frustrated I was and how I had really wanted his help.  He was surprised!  He thought I had wanted to do this myself.  So I clarified my position.  I am good with the walls, even the regular height ceilings.  But I am no sky high skylight painter.  No sir.