Spring 2014: Renovating the Yard

I'm baaa-aaaack.....

After much begging and pleading from masses of my fans (okay....2 people....maybe 3 if I stretch it...) to bring back the blog, I'm finally back in writing mode and ready to update! I can't lie, I'm pretty motivated by the large coffee I had this morning (is anyone surprised?).

So what's been going on since that stormy, stormy few weeks in April? Well, once the snow melted our backyard started to unveil itself little by little. At first we thought "Oh, it just looks so terrible because we had so much snow...it's just a little muddy. It'll dry and look nice soon."


Nope.


Our backyard had no intentions whatsoever of drying out or growing any of the grass that we had so painstakingly planted last summer. After all of the chopping, ripping, tearing, shovelling, raking, seeding, watering, etc etc that had happened last year, we were left with a big, soupy mess. I couldn't believe it. I thought that the yard had been looking pretty good by the time the snow came. See?

The grass was growing in nicely, we had a veggie garden, we moved some plants around....what happened? Canadian winter. That's what happened.

So. What were we going to do about this? After buying the house, TJ and I had thrown around a few ideas about what we would do to the backyard if we could start from scratch, but didn't really put any of them anywhere near the top of our renovation list. However, we were starting to realize that maybe we should shuffle that list around and make the yard our top priority this spring. It was time to bring in the big guns.

First things first, we had to keep hauling out the bricks, rocks and concrete blocks. A few truckloads later, the yard was looking slightly better. But why stop there? Why not move the shed to the back of the yard?

So we did.

After moving the shed I was surprised at two things. One, that the shed was still intact. Coulsons don't have the best track record when it comes to moving sheds. Two, look at how big our yard looked all of a sudden! So again....why stop there? Why not....RIP OFF THE DECK!

No, no, wait. First we should dig some holes.

How the conversation is going in the following photo:
"Digging holes is hard."
"This machine will make everything much easier."
"THIS IS AMAZING"

Yes, the machine will make everything much easier.
The conversation in the next photo:
"It's just some little ruts. It's still good, it's still good."

Okay, NOW let's rip off the deck!

Many thanks to our neighbour Gary for keeping a close eye on the going-ons and jumping in to lend a hand!

The next week or so was spent nailing all the pieces of the deck together and making sure everything was lined up correctly. Most of it was. Like many of our previous disclaimers, if you come to visit us, just make sure you kind of squint and let your eyes go unfocused. Everything will look great!

But once our "new to us" deck was in place, something was just not quite right. Hmm...what could it be.....

oh yes, the mess we had made along the way. No problem! More heavy machinery should do the trick!

There! Now everything was just like new:

Yes. This was much, MUCH better than the soggy, muddy mess. Now it was just a muddy mess! That's progress, right?

The good news is, it gets better. And soon there will be photos of the better....but for right now, enough of blogging, I'm going to sit on my deck!

On The Other Side

We did it. We made it through the storm! And.....it wasn't that bad. One of the many great things about living on our street is how protected we are. There's only a few houses, but they all seem to work together to block the wind for our house, especially anything coming from the North East. Also, all of those fantastic, overgrown chestnut trees that I like to complain about in the fall really seem to keep the weather away. Even though the wind was definitely howling and shaking the windows, it would have been a lot worse if we were out in the country! We only lost power a few times, and only for a few hours. TJ kept the wood stove stocked and the heat in our place was phenomenal - it even got to the point where I was too hot. (This, coming from someone whose daily outfit includes mittens and layer of blankets, is pretty impressive). We heated up soup, cuddled on the couch, and when the power came back, we turned off all the lights and pretended it hadn't, because we were feeling quite cozy. *Please take note that we send out huge apologies for our power outage nonchalance to all of our friends who went without power for days....we promise that you can yell at us the next time you come to visit.....

We woke up the next morning feeling like survivors. We laughed, and complimented each other on our storm prowess. What pros! What talent we had! We shovelled out our driveway in 30 minutes, again praising ourselves (and Wayne) for parking the car at the end of the driveway, which managed to create some sort of barricade to prevent snow from forming 4 foot drifts. Ru jumped through snow hills, thoroughly enjoying these magical marshmallow hills that once again allowed her to walk on the roof of the shed (and also now sit in the chestnut tree in our backyard). We came inside and made a lumberjack breakfast and many cups of coffee. We listened to storm cancellations - basically, the island was closed for business. Then we listened to more storm cancellations again the next day. And the next day. I began to wonder just exactly what had happened to the rest of the island while we were busy enjoying our house fortress.

And then there was another storm.

It's cool, I said. We've got this. We can handle storms. 48 hours of freezing rain? 30 more centimeters of snow? No biggie.

Snow day #4

On snow day #5, I cracked. At this point, I'd been confined to my house for 7 days, minus a 2 hour period where I escaped to the library for a work shift. I don't know if it was entirely the fault of the weather, or the weather combined with the lethally strong coffee from Costa Rica my mother had brought back from her travels, but I went nuts. TJ diagnosed me with cabin fever, and sent me outside to shovel and get rid of some energy.

I shovelled the deck.
I shovelled the snow bank.
I shovelled the steps.
I shovelled around the front of the car. We had forgotten to park the car at the end of the driveway this time around, and the snow had taken the opportunity to create a massive drift down the little alley between the car and the house.
I shovelled a bit of the drift.

And then I could shovel no more. I hated winter. I hated snow. I hated wind. I hated that the wind was blowing the wintery snow in my face. So I did what any self-respecting Canadian would do.

I yelled a barbarian yell and threw my shovel into the backyard. "GET IN THE HOUSE!" I yelled at the dog.

I stomped inside, threw my winter gear on the floor and continued to stomp into the living room where TJ was sitting innocently.

"I HATE THIS! I HATE WINTER! I GIVE UP, WINTER HAS WON," I wailed, draping myself across a chair. Ru stared at me with bewildered eyes.

TJ sent me to bed, and went outside to finish the shovelling. He has turned into a very nice Canadian.

Eventually, we made it out of the house. Life slowly began returning to normal. This morning we woke up and the sun was shining. Maybe spring will come after all.

And maybe we will start saving up for a tropical vacation next March.

Weathering the Storm

Once upon a time two people started a blog. They posted in the blog a little bit. Then they forgot about it. The End.
Except it wasn't the end! One day they remembered the blog, and Victoria decided that she should try to write in it again. So here it goes:

If you're a Maritimer, I'm sure you may have noticed on Facebook, the radio, television, newspapers, any type of social media, in the grocery store, etc etc.....a storm's a brewin'. I enjoy a good storm. I love cozying up in my bed, layers of blankets wrapped around (with various textures of course, you've gotta have a bit of wool, a bit of chenille, some cotton...you know, make sure you cover your basics), books piled on the floor, a never ending cup of coffee, a specially created playlist loaded on the laptop and a dog sprawled across my feet. I've spent quite a few days in this state over the winter, watching the snow drifts climb higher and higher up the front of our house. I don't mind the snow, as long as I'm cozy and do not have to go outside.

And this house...you guys, this house was made for storm days. The 500 porches make it seem like some kind of fortress where we can retreat to the inside walls and fire up the wood stove to wait things out. I've got a great view of the neighbourhood and the street from my bedroom window, so I can keep an eye on all the goings-on. Like already I can tell you that the storm is not yet bad enough for people to stop driving hay bales around on the back of their truck. I am sure that farmer was on important storm business. The wind is starting to pick up a little and Wayne has parked his car at the end of the driveway, which I've noticed is part of his bad weather preparations. Wayne seems like the kind of guy who knows what he's doing, so TJ, not wanting to blatantly COPY him, but thinking that maybe he should do something similar, has started parking the car facing out towards the street.

Book stockpiles, blankets and car parking are all part of the normal preparations for any kind of winter weather here, but this particular storm is supposed to be the BIG ONE. Like really big. Despite that we're already 5 days into spring (Mother Nature, flip your calendar already) there's 50+ centimetres on its way, plus another 30-40 cms supposedly coming on Sunday. We're being told to prepare for 72 hours of isolation, just in case. The Island is shutting down. And as much as I enjoy a good storm, this one is making me just a little teensy bit nervous. I think it's mostly the 100km winds that I'm not looking forward to. I felt like maybe I should be doing something to prepare, so I went to the store and bought....vegetables. Spinach and carrots. Let's just say my preparation abilities were pretty rusty. The newspapers suggested to buy batteries, make sure you've got flashlights, canned food, etc. I wasn't 100% on what we would actually use batteries for, aside from flashlights, so I didn't buy any. Is that a storm faux pas? I do have a rather extensive candle collection. Canned soup is not my favourite, so I made soup. I did buy the #stormchips. I made sure Ru had lots of extra food and bought 3 giant jugs of water so she would have clean drinking water just in case. I later realized that there would be an abundance of snow that could be melted for drinking water (survivor skills!) but it was too late, I was not going back to Superstore. I filled the bathtub with water too, just because that's what my dad always did. Is there anything I'm missing? A rotary telephone. I just realized. Does anyone know where I can get a rotary telephone?

I've never had to deal with a major storm before - good timing prevented me from being right in the middle of both Hurricane and White Juan, hightailing it out of Halifax before they hit - but I think we'll be okay. I hope. Maybe. Maybe we'll be okay. I feel like there's a fine line between survival mode and sheer panic in my life, and I'm not entirely sure which side I'll be on once the storm reaches it's peak. If there's power, I'll be sure to update and let everyone know. Until then, I'm going to snuggle back into bed with this little one, who had a natural instinct to take cover:

The One With The Before And After Photos...

The day has finally come! I think every house blogger, whether professional or pathetically amateur (such as ourselves), starts their blog just to get to this moment. Yes, that's right, it's finally time to see the "after" photos! Well, not the complete after, maybe more so the "middle" photos. There's still some renovations to do, but as we mentioned before, we're now a year into owning our home and are pretty proud of how far it's come since that day last August when we walked in the door. The change has been pretty awesome. It's been a lot of work and sweat, but thankfully, not as many tears as we thought! We definitely couldn't have done this without the help of our families, in particular, my dad and my brother in law, Shane. So thank you, thank you, thank you to anyone who has showed up to knock out walls, put up walls, sand walls, wash walls, paint walls, or look at walls. We'd also like to take a moment to thank everyone who has been following our little blog. We love hearing all of the comments from readers, and we hope to keep the blog going as long as we can, so please, keep following! 

Saturday Begins.

Uuuuuuuggghhh......


That's the collective sound the three of us make when we realize it's Saturday morning and the sun is beginning to rise through the bedroom window. We are morning zombies. Or vampires? Which is it that don't like the sun...maybe both? We are morning zompires.

Ru is the first to wake up. She snorts and wiggles and then squirms her way from the bottom of the bed up to the pillows, and stuffs her nose into my ear. Then she stretches her long legs, and they jab into my stomach and ribs. While I'm gasping for breath and trying to dry out my ear, she flips over and licks TJ's head to see if it will wake him up. It won't. He is immune. So I get out of bed, and we go downstairs into the cold November morning.

Ru rings the bells that hang on the doorknob to tell me she wants outside, so we both go out to survey the yard. No snow yet. But soon. After a quick look around, we're back in for breakfast. Ru loves breakfast (and food in general) and performs her food time ritual of jumping around in a flip before sitting at her food bowl. She gobbles, and it's out again. By now I'm wide awake, and also frozen from our outside trips. No sooner do I lock the door after coming back inside and Ru is already upstairs, snuggled back into bed, fast asleep.

I trudge upstairs, wondering if it's possible to sleep again, or do I just suck it up and stay awake? I sit in bed, and the blankets are still warm. It's so cozy. WOMP. Ru's foot is back in my ribs. I sigh, and pull out my laptop to see what happened overnight. Ru and TJ snore in unison. They stretch like a synchronized swimming team, arching backs and turning to dive back under the covers. Outside, the birds in the bare chestnut trees on our street are screaming across the road to one another.

Saturday begins.

Gutter Toads and Other Things...

Well, so much for the promise of having our blog come back full force in September! It's now....November. Better late than never, I guess! This past weekend someone asked us how the house renovations were coming along. I had to pause and think about it because it didn't really seem like we've been doing much lately, just little things here and there that didn't make a huge difference. But sometimes, little things can really add up.....

Meet THE LIST:

This is what was left over after all of the major renos had taken place. All those little bitty things you told yourself you would eventually do.....and then never did.....and now here they are, staring at you all the time, because they are sitting on the coffee table in the living room. And when people come over to visit they look at it and say "Hey, what's this?" and you say "Oh that old thing? That's just my arch-enemy, ignore it, here, have a cookie, it will go away". But it never goes away. Funnily enough though, I actually really like the list. I feel a bit better when I can see everything that needs to be done instead of having it swim around in my head. It feels less overwhelming, somehow.

So that's sort of what we've been working on. And sweeping. There's been a lot of floor sweeping. As it turns out, dogs are really dirty. One of their main activities is going outside and collecting dirt to bring inside. It didn't help that we trained Ru to go out the guest entry door, which is where we've been doing a lot of work and creating a lot of dirt that she had to pass through many, many, many times a day. She's like a little furry dirt magnet.

Remember the guest entry?

We decided that we wanted to try and get it cleaned up a little bit so visitors can actually use it, rather than have them traipsing through our mudroom/laundry room/storage room/place where we throw stuff. The flooring people from Tops to Floors had already started the clean up a year ago when we had new flooring laid in the kitchen. At the time we discovered just how rotted the floor was in this area, as well as how shaky the walls were, but since we hadn't budgeted to do an overhaul in here, we decided to try to fix it for the time being and then worry about it later. Subfloor went down, then laminate. There wasn't much we could do to the walls at the time, other than to tell people to be careful when opening and closing the door. To get an idea of what's going on in this room, here's a picture of a painting we found:

(Fun house fact: You can see what things used to look like before the library area was added on...the door to the far left is the door that currently leads down into our "reading porch")

Originally the entryway was open, and someone had decided to close it in. Pine panelling went over the existing exterior walls, and then they quickly framed in a makeshift door/wall/window section to close it up. Once it was cleared out, it looked like this:

TJ got to work sealing up all of the drafty bits, then we taped it up and he got to work painting. Here is a bit of free renovation advice: When faced with a problem area, paint it. You will feel better.

Here, you can see how painting works. Things are much happier. Except the door, which is a clear example of how terrible things are when they are not painted. Please excuse the frog tape, there has been a small issue with its removal....in that it is not removing. Also note the trim that TJ added along the floor to distract from other undesirable areas....

This picture kind of gives you an idea of how the room was closed in. On the left, that white strip down the middle is one of the original exterior walls. On the right, that dark square is a gap where all of the various materials just didn't quite meet up the way they should have.

However, once you take a step back and kind of let your eyes go out of focus, it doesn't look so bad! I'm not sure what will happen to this entryway a few years down the road, I like the idea of opening it back up again but I suspect that wouldn't really help with our draft situation....

So under the Guest Entry section of our list we can now cross off "painting" and "shelf up". Still to go are "clean door", "clean windows", "tape removal", "fix concrete step", "paint concrete step", "get bench" and "new lamp post".

One thing on the list that bugged TJ was the gutter/drainpipe situation. In short, they didn't work. This may be due to the fact that they were pieced together in an unusual way that did not lend itself to proper drainage, but rather to the collection of rainwater. In particular, the guest entry side of the house was quite bad, so it needed to be replaced. We found many interesting things once the gutters were removed, such as...

Holes. Apparently there's supposed to be a metal piece that goes in behind the gutter to keep out things like water and birds. We had no metal piece, but we did have the water and birds. There was actually a nest inside this hole, which would account for some of the weird scratching noises I kept hearing in the ceiling. Sometimes, when the holes were quite apparent, we would also find treasures such as this:

Gutter gloves! I guess TJ found these stuffed into one of the holes and then spray foamed/tarred over? As it turns out, the squirrel that ate our hammock earlier in the summer really liked the gloves, and stole one of them to take home. He actually carried it over the telephone wire that crosses over the street. Very impressive feat for a little squirrel.

We also found this nice little toad:

He wasn't in the gutter, he was on the ground, but I was very excited because I haven't found a garden toad since I was a kid. It took a few tries to catch him, then we put him somewhere safe, away from the squirrel (just in case).

While all of this was going on, Ru managed to scar herself for life by getting stuck in the garden hose.

The garden hose winder (for lack of a more technical term) used to be up by the lamp post. Ru somehow got her leash tangled around it and became absolutely terrified when it started to move behind her, so she ran.....and it chased her, which scared her even more. Then it knocked over a pile of pots and a sprinkler, and Ru ran around the wood pile, smack into the neighbour's car, which also scared her. This picture is taken after all of this, once I uprighted the garden hose and stopped laughing. I'm a terrible mother, but it was hilarious. I had to pretty much carry Ru past it, as she would go nowhere near it. We tried to keep her outside with us but she was shaking so badly that she could barely stand, so we put her in the house for the rest of the day where she felt sorry for herself and did her best impression of a Victorian fainting lady:

Eventually the gutters were fixed:

Overall, things weren't looking too bad:

A huge change from before. Gardens are cleared, grass is growing, leaves are raked. Well, they were at the time of this picture. Autumn happened right after, so we'll have to break the rake out again next weekend before forgetting moving inside for the winter and beginning to plan for next spring. Vesseys Catalogue, here I come! 

So that's what we've been up to over the last month or two. And, as promised, a side by side comparison IS coming! Sometime....

Autumn Awakening

It seems like almost every night throughout the summer when I would finally sit down at my macbook after a long day of working at the library, followed by working in the backyard, followed by working in the kitchen, etc, etc, I would think to myself, "Hmmm....should really post a blog update". Then I would promptly fall asleep. Thanks to this ritual, I now have a small stockpile of photos and stories from the past few months, and absolutely no idea where to begin.

Luckily, my ability to procrastinate has worked in my favour this time. Instead of writing blog posts, I've been stalling by organizing all of the pictures in iPhoto by the date they were taken. I'm left with a photo history of the last few months, which then acts like an outline for blogging. Pretty crafty, huh? I'm sort of a genius.

So let's look where we left off: We had a ceiling in the sunroom, cupboards in the laundry room, pine boards on the back hall, a garden that wasn't looking too bad, and a brand new puppy. Things were coming up Milhouse, if we did say so ourselves. We moved Ru into her little back hall puppy room, complete with a massive Costco dog bed and a freezer, courtesy of TJ's parents. Ru showed her appreciation by eating the stopper for the manual defrost system on the freezer.

We had some very lovely garden moments in early July....everything was in full bloom, the veggies were vegging in the dirt...all we had to do was sit back and relax, which we did in the double hammock that arrived for my birthday :D

And just because they were so beautiful, and I can't help myself....peonies!

We were able to tear ourselves away from the garden every so often to go to the beach...Ru did pretty well for her first time in the water, although she quickly learned to climb onto the nearest person if she felt the water was getting too deep. She soon let us know that she was not really an outdoorsy type of dog, and she much preferred to spend her summer in the cool shade of the living room, sleeping on a variety of comfy pillows.

Summer wasn't all flowers and beaches though. We did have to change from bathing suits and gardening clothes to our formal work attire every so often, TJ for the lab and me for a new job with Provincial Library Services in Summerside. We also cracked the whip to get things moving in the renovation department, so Shane showed up once more. This time around we needed to extend the tiling around our fire place in order to keep our fire insurance.

The before....

The process....

Moving out the insert, which weighs approximately a half ton....and taping an outline of where the new tiles will go.

The back of the insert looks...safe. Making the first cut and......realizing this is not tile. This is solid brick.

Shane brought out the big gun....the jackhammer. I was thisclose to getting to use it, but apparently you shouldn't use power tools if your footwear of choice is sandals. The brick was finally toast, and the tiles were finally laid....except for when we ran out and had to wait for the tile store to open again.

Once the final tiles were laid, the filling was added in....I forget the correct term for the filling that goes between the tiles. All I remember is that it was a pain to clean afterwards. The stove was slid back into place and....voila!

Now we just have to do some paint touch ups and a little bit of caulking and the fireplace will be ready for action once again.

With all of this work completed, we felt like it was finally time for some house guests. TJ's parents arrived from Ireland to spend two weeks with us at the end of July. However, this was no vacation. No no, they were put to work straight away.

Within a few days they managed to clear out the jungle garden. This included four or five trees, plus all three tiers of the flower bed. Bulbs were dug out and saved for next year, irises, peonies and lillies transplanted, poppy seeds collected and bagged, forsythia trees relocated. It was amazing. There's something to be said for imported labor. And cheap! They worked for BBQed sausages. Brilliant! They were so skilled and quick though that I didn't managed to get any pictures of their work until after they had left. The garden was looking amazing though. All TJ and I had to do was dig up the railway ties, grade the garden down to a less hazardous level and seed. I'll be honest - it was a little hard to make the decision to dig out the garden. It really was beautiful in June and July, but by August things were starting to become extremely overgrown and nothing new was blossoming, so it was looking like a big mess. A lot of the flowers were at the point where they'd have to be divided or cut back, and some were escaping the brick confines of the flower bed and overtaking the back steps. At one point, Ru even became lost in the irises and sat down and cried. I had to wade in and find her, then bring her back out to the yard. With my limited gardening skills, I knew that I wouldn't be able to properly take care of the garden, and I also wanted to have the chance to do my own thing. So out it went.

By early September it was looking like this:

The grass is still a bit patchy in places, but hopefully by next year it will look a bit better. We'll have to keep seeding it out once we see what grows in the Spring. A lot of them have already filled in since these pictures were taken about a week ago. There's still some flowers that we'll have to dig out as well, but really, I don't think it looks too bad compared to what it looked like last August:

Speaking of last August, we recently just passed out 1st year house anniversary! To celebrate, we'll be doing a side by side comparison photo post to show you just how far we've come in a year. I didn't want to post any pictures of the inside of the house in its current stage, as I wanted to wait until all the boxes have been put away, walls have been painted and decorations have been put up, but who knows when that will ever happen! So stay tuned in the next few weeks...maybe TJ will even make a guest blogger appearance! Until then...