https://youtu.be/NLzG441z0QM
Monday, November 15, 2021
Tuesday, November 9, 2021
November 8th, Goodbye to our Jack
Yesterday was a very sad day for Tom and I, as we say goodbye to our fur baby Jackson, aka Jack or Jackman.
A trusted friend and companion, he was always happy to be hiking and in the wilderness. We are very sad but we are happy that he was able to make this journey with us to New Brunswick.
Jack was a rescue dog when we adopted him in Dec 2010 and approx 2-3 years old. He enjoyed hiking, backpacking/camping and enjoyed his lazy carefree years on the farm and then went on this big adventure with us.
We love you and will miss you very much.
Rest in peace Jack!
We took the rest of the day off, picked up Highway and went for a drive and lunch.
Nov 7th From Sardine Can to an Empty shell
Hi Everyone,
Today is a good day to get you caught up in all we have been doing.
We have been in the house for approx 6 weeks and we still are not exactly unpacking. When we first looked at the house, we figured a couple of coats of paint on the walls and we would be good to go. Well not exactly.
The floors were the first thing that we added as an extra project. Changing the floors in the dining, kitchen, living and hallway has been a very long project. If you can imagine it took 2 days to sand down to the wood, then 5 coats of paint with 3 runs of sanding until we finally got the colour we wanted. And while I say 5 coats and 3 sands, that translates into at least 16 days as each process took 2 days. Add a few days that we ran away for the day, a few days of finding anything else to do other than the floors and that pretty much equals a month. And if that isn't enough we still will have 3 coats of varnish = 6 days with drying time.
But at least, all of the sanding is done. We have lived with the dust for weeks, and every day we take dishes and groceries from the spare bedroom for meals and then put everything away again to continue with the process.
While this was going on, we also took all the doors off the cupboards, and sanded all of the wood for repainting. The doors and drawers were sanded outside and there was quite a bit of hand sanding to get into all of the grooves of the cupboards. We are now in the painting process for the cupboards.
All of the spray painting has now been completed for the knobs and drawer pulls and we are waiting for the final painting of the drawers to start putting handles on. We do have some of the cupboards with doors up and it is starting to look good.
Now that I have cupboards I started to unpack a few dishes and wash and fill the cupboards. It will be a bit of a process for all of that, while we dig our way through the pile. Not only do we have to find all of the house stuff but it must be carried upstairs and of course unpacked and washed. While painting cupboards Tom also painted the inside of the linen closet so that I can put away some of the blankets and quilts. But they all require washing and drying.
Our dryer doesn't work properly and we have yet to find a service man for that job. It works sometimes for 2 minutes and I must constantly restart it. Sometimes it needs to take a break for about an hour before it will work again. It's one of those new fangle machines with digital messages, and the message I get most often says call a technician. Thankfully every once in a while I get 22 minutes out of it, just enough to call it done and dry. But this is still low on the list to get repaired or buy a new one.
We still don't have a stove or the new fridge. We did buy a set, but the company didn't meet delivery date and even a week ago still no sign of it coming so we cancelled with them and had our money refunded. We had ordered the appliances before we moved in. Luckily we have the old fridge. We use a hotplate and the toaster oven as an alternative. It seems to be okay for the most part. Going shopping tomorrow for the appliances.
The pressure tank for the water went on the fritz too. That was when Mike from Davis Plumbing came to the rescue. We replaced the tank, and thought we were done. Nope! We needed to call Mike again to look at our water pump. As it turns out, we have a very shallow well and used too much water in a very short period of time and reached the bottom of the well. After a day of slowly refilling and some sludge things are now back to normal. We are truly grateful that Mike was able to come to the rescue.
I cry often. It is just so frustrating. Don't worry I am ok. Tom is my rock and glue. We have even laughed that we miss the carefree days of the camper. LOL, I never thought they would be the good ole days. I thought by now we would be settled in and going to explore this province. But we are still not unpacked and NB is still on a covid circuit breaker lock down, so we are limited to where we can go for at least another week. Cross your fingers that it gets lifted soon.
But it isn't all doom and gloom, we met Ross!
Ross, Glenn and Malcolm came to our rescue and built us an amazing balcony deck. You will see the pictures below. These guys were done in 3 days and I was dancing on our new deck. Our plans originally were to build a pen underneath it for the pets, but after seeing it finished, we may use partially for a carport and some other ideas. We still plan to add a cat run from the window under the deck into the trees and back again. Then the cats can be outside and safe from the road.
Each day when the guys were working on the deck, they would come in the basement and sit and have their coffee and lunch and we would join them. Ross lives close by and is a wealth of information, and we are constantly asking him questions about the area and who to call. Tom and I often will be having a conversation and be wondering who to talk to about something and we came with the "Just ask Ross" slogan! Look out Ross, we have a bunch of questions coming your way soon! We also had the opportunity to meet Patty, Ross's wife and she makes her own wine! I see some great convo's on the deck as we sit back and sip on some wine. Glenn's wife is apparently a scrapper and crafter, can't wait to meet her too! oh yeah, more fun ahead!
Glenn lives near Sussex and is building a new house next year and looking for someone to buy his current house, Just putting it out there if anyone is thinking of moving out this way. I know a couple of you would be easy to sway..... I can't wait til you come to visit and then we can go look at his house.
Thank-you very much Ross, Glenn and Malcolm! You guys are amazing!
It was so refreshing to have these guys build our deck and have some joke time and laughs. Tom and I came to realize that if we were going to ever get settled in this place, we needed to get more help.
That was when the discussion of the basement started... I mean, they could see we had some work to do right? While we thought we were going to just do it all ourselves, it is such a daunting task and it would never get completed. So we are hiring the guys to keep going with the basement. They are coming back to get started in the next week. This requires that we must empty half the basement so they can work on the one side and then they will come back again to work on the other side.
Now.....if you saw my video of my studio, you can only imagine what a task this will be to empty the basement area. I will save that for my next post. If that is not enough, we have been buying bits of furniture from facebook sellers and the Refit stores to add to the pile. (Another post)
This pretty much gets you up to date of where we are at. While I will show some pictures below of our progress, you will have to wait to see the end result.
Here are some pics for you to view.
Sanding the floors step 1
Cupboard doors and drawers removed. Back splash is gone. Sanding cupboards begins
Mike from Davis Plumbing in Sussex. Thank-you Mike!
First coat of blue paint, then 2 coats of white, another blue and final white. 5 coats
More to come soon!
Tuesday, November 2, 2021
Cupboard hardware sneak peek
In the refurbishing of our kitchen cupboards, we need approx 37 pieces of hardware drawers and pulls.
After shopping at several stores, I discovered that I was looking at no less than 400.00 to have just basic stuff not even anything fancy.
I started digging through several boxes of my art stuff and Tom went through his collection and we managed to find all we need.
These are the sets we will be using, but don't turn your nose up just yet, they will all be repainted one colour.
I love that they are mostly different. They will be a matched set where 2 doors meet, and on drawers that need 2 pulls they will also match.
This is just a sneak peek of what is yet to come. Cost for these is approx $20.00 and a can of spraypaint for about $17.00 txs incld. Stay tuned for the finished pieces.
Tuesday, October 12, 2021
September 29th Wednesday to October 3rd Sunday
Tom rented a floor sander to start to sand the floors. While he will do most of it with this machine, he will have to get another edge sander to finish the edges. While he sands, I am the holder of the cord. Now that is a very boring side job but it helps to not worry about the cord, apparently a hazard to using the machine.
While we were busy with that on the inside, we had Ryan and Walter Peters (a father and son team) install eaves-troughs on the house. Many people don't have eaves-troughs on their houses. No real reason why, but very common, at least on the many houses we looked at. Either way, we got them done and another box checked off of our list. Thank-you Ryan and Walter!
When the sanding was done we took the machine back to St John and then came back home to wait to go pick up our piano.
Wait! What? A piano?
Ok let's backtrack a little bit. While we were still at the campground, I was regularly reading the Sussex Facebook buy and sell page and happened upon a free piano. I showed it to Tom, who at the time agreed it was an awesome piece to repurpose into either a coffee bar, or desk or something. Maybe even a wine bar. We weren't sure but we would do something with it. I contacted the young woman, Areil and asked if we could pick up after we moved into the house. It wasn't a problem and I was pretty excited to get this new piece. It never dawned on me why no one else had offered to take it.
So today was the day to pick it up. I had contacted Areil and we arranged that we would come when her husband was home from work. She had mentioned that the piano was heavy and we would need some strength to load this on to the truck. Okay so if there is Tom and I and her husband that should work right? It turns out that the piano weighs over 600 pounds. There was no way I could help. But the 2 guys got it on the back of the truck and we knew that we would have to disassemble the piano before we could get it off the truck. No problem, there are plenty of YouTube videos for that! Thank-you Areil and her super hubbyman!
We got home and made plans to work on it on Friday.
October 1 Friday. We need a break! I shopped on the internet, caught up on some email, and other computer stuff and we watched our new TV. Tom assembled some other furniture pieces. We had some chairs to sit on, and a table to eat. Things are getting done!
October 2nd Saturday. It is raining again, so no working on the piano. Cupboard doors and drawers and the hardware was removed from the kitchen cupboards and Tom started the sanding. There is dust everywhere! Goodbye brown cupboards and backsplash. Yes we took down the backsplash. I never realized until recently that I have issues with repetitive geometric patterns, things like chevron, repeat circles, squares, and backsplash rectangles. I am not sure what style of backsplash we will put to replace it. I've never had a backsplash before. I don't know if I am able to commit to a backsplash. I think I will just stick with soap and water for now.
There was so much dust, we picked up a pizza and ate in the basement in front of the TV.
October 3rd Sunday
Tom started to dismantle the piano, it is quite an ordeal. There are many cool pieces that could be repurposed for something. We are saving all of the bits and pieces. The piano is starting to look like a very industrial piece and we are starting to put some ideas together about the basement family room. Getting a steampunk, industrial feeling coming to us. This could be a seriously fun project!
While Tom worked on the piano, I attempted to find stuff to fill 2 orders I had from my website. The orders were long overdue, I am grateful that my customers are so understanding. Since I had no luck at finding the stuff, I instead decided to take a video of the piles of stuff that will someday be my art studio. The video has been linked on FaceBook, but here is the link to it again if you missed it.
My plan is to share my methods and madness of organizing and rebuilding my studio.
Sanding the floors
September 24th Friday to September 28th Tuesday
I forgot to mention that we met one of our neighbours Trevor, on our very first day at the house. He came to welcome us, he had been working in the garden and brought us a squash and a cucumber. He lives with his daughter up the hill from us on one side and has a full farm, animals, and an apple orchard. Trevor is the brother of the previous owner Patty, and his cousin Dean lives across the highway from us. Dean stopped over today to say hello. Both neighbours are a wealth of information and we are very happy to meet them. It seems there are 2 main family lines that originated in the area. Many of the distant lineage still live in the area. It will be interesting to explore more of the history in the future.
Our container came today, filled to the brim with all of the stuff we haven't seen in a few months We started to unload it and probably got 1/4 way done. It truly is like playing Jenja to unload this thing, one wrong move and we could topple a whole row. Everything was strategically packed to keep everything held together. It rained very hard for part of the day so we then focused on the inside of the house. Tom put together one of the beds so I was able to sleep inside while he continues to sleep in the camper. (The bed is a single bed) I would have stayed in the camper but I snore, and I also get up several times a night to use the bathroom and we have disconnected that option. For the record, the bed inside is not exactly that comfortable and I have a few kinks that will take some time to work out.
We had a great supper of steak and sushi. And you could have knocked me over with a feather when Tom bought a chocolate cheesecake for dessert. Trust me, that never ever happens. But I am happy to enjoy it.
September 25th Saturday
Though it isn't a term I am happy to use, it rained cats and dogs all day long. A wicked steady heavy downpour. It wasn't moving. We did manage to unpack more of the container in between raindrops, we are now about 1/3 done.
Tom put together the cat beds, we have 2 very happy cats that instantly jumped in their beds. Lulu and Ratatouille are sleeping with me for now, but they have options.
We went back to Animal Land camp to celebrate John and Lisa's 50th birthdays (in October). We had a pot luck supper. I made garlic spinach rolls. OM goodness there was so much food.
We didn't stay late, we were so tired, and it was a very scary ride home in the dark and in the rain. I took a lot of pictures for them but the pictures later in the evening that showed up on Facebook made me realize we missed out on a lot of fun. Such a great group of people. Ok sad again.....
September 26th Sunday. Today I finally unloaded the car. Done! I was able to have the back hutch open right up to the basement doors. It rained again all day.
Tom patched walls for painting, I learned how to use the laundry machines, there are a few issues. Then we had a power failure for a couple hours. Off to Sussex!
We had picked up a few more groceries, now we don't have to plan for just one or 2 days. I can actually buy food and put in the fridge and freezer. Sure makes me aware of just how fortunate we are.
September 27th Monday
Today I set up the computer and printer, while Tom set up the Bad Boy TV downstairs. I'm calling it an early Birthday present for Tom. We bought it on sale (a very good deal) and had to rearrange everything in the cargo trailer to keep til we got into the house. LOL see I am not the only one that bought big stuff while we were still in the trailer.
Then the service man came to hook us up to everything and even showed us a few things on our TV, the TV is smarter than us no doubt. It is awesome to be connected again, I can't wait to watch life size YouTube videos while I am in my studio.
September 28th Tuesday
The container is now unloaded!!! Done! Pretty much everything is in the basement until we get the painting done upstairs. We have decided that we are stripping the floors and repainting, and we are sanding the cupboards and repainting those too. Goodbye brown.
It will be awhile before I can unpack anything, but might as well get the dust over and done with now.
The Bad Boy! Notice ceilings are unfinished, this will change sometime in the new year.
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