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!

Everything is Big!

When we bought our "country estate" as we have taken to calling our new 5 acre property, we didn't comprehend that everything about it was exponentially larger than our city lot.

Oh, we knew it was bigger - but it's wayyyyyy bigger - the yard, the shrubs, the trees, the distances between things.

One of the first days we were there I took off my jacket during a hot flash, mindlessly put it down and carried on with what I was doing.  Later, when the sun went down and we were relaxing on the back deck, I got chilled and went searching for my jacket.  To the barn - a football field distance from the house - nope, not there, back to the front yard (the football field again), nope not there.  Was it in the trailer, parked beside the barn?  The football field again...you get the picture.  I got the picture - this place is frigging huge! 

And there have been other situations driving the point home....

Watering the front garden meant either - three of our city size garden hoses joined together from the tap at the deck, OR scrambling all the way through the crawl space under the house to turn the water on at the tap on the front yard side of the house.  After a short period of imagining spiders, newts and other real and imagined creepy crawlies that could be under the house, I gathered up three hoses!

Gardening has exploded to a new level.  The shrubs were all quite overgrown when we took over the place at the end of May, so weekends this past month or so have been all about trimming.  Looking back now, we laugh at our first day on the "job" when we rolled over our wheelbarrow, and cut the first few branches off a 10 ft hydrangea.  Ha - wheelbarrow full in less than two minutes.  Bring on the enormous waste disposal bin fortuitously found on side of road, badly caved in on one side.  Chuckles, being Mr. Handyman, heated the plastic and knocked out the dents, thinking this would be a handy vessel at the country estate.  And it is - as a containment device for rubbish destined for our utility trailer, which has proven to be the best garden implement we own.  That and the former hunting buggy, Chuckles Suzuki Sidekick, which has been commandeered as the tow vehicle for the utility trailer as it will go anywhere on the property.  We can now trim bushes all day long and at the end of the day go four-wheeling to the back of the property where we have established a dump pile - of material to be burned when the cool autumn weather arrives. 

We mowed the lawn once by hand, another laughable situation.  Our friend Nick, who lives nearby the country estate, says the neighbors must all realize when city-folk move in at the sound of push mowers starting up!

It only took us the one time - four hours with both of us working at it - one mowing, one weed whacking, to realize that a ride-on was a must have.  So we have a new John Deere mower in the fleet now.

So far we have bought the mower, a good gas weedeater, and a leafblower.  The list of what we still will need keeps on growing!

 

One thing for sure - we won't be bored here, there is always something to do!