The New Brunswick Journey: 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