Our Home - Part 1
I haven’t written much lately for two reasons:
I’ve been busy building… exhausting, sweaty building. The kind of building that makes you just want to lay in a hot bath and ease your aching muscles. (Damn, I wish my bathtub was not still sitting wrapped up in my bedroom.)
Nothing is photo finished, and as an interior designer, it’s hard to translate the look without, you know, the look.
But, I realised that what I’m doing may still be as fun and interesting to read as it is for me to do. So I will be getting back to this blog with a few short stories about building some of the elements of my home. Over the past few months I’ve painted the whole house, built shelving, done drywall window and door returns, tiled floors, laid engineered hardwood floors, and hung doors and trim. For reasons I will explain, a lot of these elements are not done to industry standards. But they are done well. And as it all comes together, they are starting to look great!
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When we started getting quotes for our reno we were over budget. We scaled it back dramatically by eliminating any work on the main half of the house, but it was still over and we couldn’t figure out how to bring it into reality. Essentially, it’s impossible to build a finished extension for what we had. So we got a quote based on building until primer. I’m pretty handy, so I figured, no problem, I’ll paint, tile, and do the floors… easy. OK, I know I should have known this, but primer goes on really early. Really early! When the contract ended we were left with a building site.
It was hard to get our head around what needed to be done. The place was a mess. At first we thought, ok lets, at lease, work on the curb appeal. The water service upgrade left us with the front lawn, walkway, and circular driveway ripped out, turned upside-down, and replaced with rough gravel. (Read about that here.) We still had the disposal container and so we picked up the broken pieces of asphalt with our hands and tossed them in. The kids even helped with this. I found picking up the larger pieces worked better in the sun as they melted and broke easily. LOL!
The weather here is funny. In May the lawns look really lush and green, but by mid-summer it gets so hot that they turn yellow and burnt. We’re planning for a garden that works with the hotter weather and doesn’t require a lot of water. We put down pea stones over the circular driveway which we like the look of, as it reminds up of our yearly trips to the South of France. We also replaced the stones on the walkway, repaired the irrigation system, and rolled out tons on new sod.
We had never done anything like that before, and although it looks ok, it’s not great. The stones are too deep and hard to walk on, grass is quite bumpy, and the walkway sank (which we knew would happen, but is still disappointing). The city has still not replaced the asphalt sidewalk with finished concrete and we know that when they do, they will rip up some of the lawn and driveway, so there’s no point fixing it any more until that is completed.
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Next I moved indoors.
to be continued…
