House 95% complete

So one year from the pouring of the foundation footings, we held our house-warming party. This blog has documented the progression from foundation to frame to insulation, drywall, paint and every bump in between. The house is the result of alot of love and work from our friends and family, and I think it shows through. It is a lovely place to come home to and I'm very proud of it :)

Dining room


Living room (with fireplace I just stained last week)


Stairwell and TV corner, with the berber carpet I love. We choose carpet because it was the less expensive option, but it brings a needed warmth to the area & I would choose it again given the option. I love sitting on the winders.


Accent chairs I re-upholstered myself (I spent $30 for the fabric but only $20 for both chairs. Ha.)


Entry, with pastel prints from Ghana.


Maybe my favorite room in the house: Office with reading corner




Family bathroom


Family bathroom


House-warming party carnage.

Wrong Holiday my Little Friend

Hmm..my cat and I were sitting at the computer this morning, alone in the house. I heard a funny scratching sound coming from downstairs. Was someone trying to break into our house? My cat, noticing the sound as well, jumped from my lap to investigate. As I slowly descended the stairs, I realized the sound was coming from the fireplace. It sounded like logs were falling down over themselves while burning low...but there was no fire going. So I opened the door and stared into the black eyes of a trapped bird. Shocked, I failed to close the door in time, as the bird flew out toward the patio door. My cat's instinct kicked in, and he went chasing after the bird, but backed off when I yelled at him at the top of my lungs. Luckily the bird flew toward the patio and not up the stairs, but the poor thing got caught up in the sheers. He was fluttering about, repeatedly smacking into the window, and wouldn't come away from the corner. I was able to open the patio door and screen, and then gently coax the startled Starling out with creative use of the curtains. As far as I could tell, his flying was unaffected and he seemed quite well. My cat, on the other hand, was still shaking with excitement ten minutes later.

I wonder how often I'll have to fish birds out of our fireplace? That's not in the manual.

Halifax Pop Explosion! + trees

Great bands lined up this year. The perpetual dilemma is always finding enough cash to attend them all : tomorrow night is Amos the Transparent with Rebekah Higgs and Basia Balut on Saturday are both must-go's. My husband is away this weekend so I'll be all by myself and will need to recruit someone to attend the Saturday show with.

And in response to my failed experiments lately, I turned to my supervisor for some advice. He came swooping down to my desk this morning about 25 minutes before I was planning on leaving for my tattoo appointment, and we went through my work to date, double checking all my sequencing primers, their orientation, etc. Anyway, it made me sort of nervous. I was sweating harder sitting at my desk than I did later in the tattoo parlour. Thankfully, he found all my work so far to be satisfactory, and it was possible my sequencing efforts were failing due to nothing I could control or know about in advance (my insight into the genome has since improved, so I'll rerun some of the tests tonight to see whether I can get a different outcome). I semi-jokingly asked him whether I "passed the test", and he said that I had indeed passed the test. So I ran outta here as fast as I could to keep him from changing his mind.

And here are some pictures of our tiny pathetic shrubs and landscaping in front of the house. They'll look good in ten years, probably :)





(I just pulled my PCR reagents from the fridge while those pics were uploading. There is a whole fridge, and we are all crammed into one corner of one side of one shelf. Sigh.)

The Inside (a little bit)

I took a few pictures of the inside of the house last week before company arrived. We had five guests + one dog staying with us for several days, including my two nieces (twins) aged two years old. I fault them entirely for the cold I am currently battling. The weather more or less co-operated while they were here, so we went for day trips to Frog Pond, the Natural History Museum and Duncan's Cove (where the millions of huckleberries are about to ripen any day- yum yum).

Some of the dining room (with dining room set purchased through kijiji - looks nice eh?), and the kitchen, messy with small appliances that haven't quite found a home yet.




Here is a picture of the downstairs bathroom with mirror and towel ring that doesn't yet have a job, technically, since we haven't picked up hand towels for that room.


The office room has a gigantic messy desk in one corner (overlooking the water in the backyard) and on the other side of the room, a "reading corner" with a comfy chair I ordered online via Home Depot, and a new painting we got at Homesense for 30% off.



Oh, and one crazy writhing cat.

The spare room is fairly sparse yet. My big accomplishment in this room was the linens. I couldn't find the right combo of dark chocolate brown and light blue in pre-packaged sets, so I just bought multiple stripped damask sheets sets in the right colours and made curtains and pillow shams from the flat sheets. Can you imagine that pilllow shams, similar in design to the brown ones on the bed, cost upwards of $40 each? Is that not ridiculous? Who would ever pay that much per pillow sham?? And try as I might, I couldn't even find them for less than $10 each on super-clearance sale (and even then, they weren't the right colour). So out came the trusty sewing machine :)




Notice the crazy cat in the above picture? Starved for attention since we haven't been spending much time at home lately. He followed me around while I was taking each picture, rudely ruining them. He usually isn't so demonic looking, I swear.

Lab House Lab House Lab House

I finally called my mom the other night. She was wondering what the hell happened to me. No emails, no blog updates, not a single update on facebook even. She was not alone, I assured her...the radio silence has affected nearly everyone in my life save for my husband and my labmates. In ten days I give my departmental seminar (1 hour) and the following week I give a shorter but more important talk at a conference being held here in town. And since I have no real data, I've been trying to spend lots of time here in the lab. Today (a sunny beautiful Sunday): all afternoon in the lab visualizing a Southern without results-my probe was too old I suspect so tomorrow I'll be repeating the entire procedure (save for having my fingers crossed this time around). And NCBI database is frustratingly slow right now, so sequence analysis is painstaking.

The house is coming along, I will try to post some pictures eventually. On Friday we had twelve loads of fill dumped and spread in the backyard, and the side driveway & frontyard shaped in preparation for topsoil and sod. I had plans (oh big plans dammit) for a half wall in the front yard and instructed the excavator man to create two grades in the front yard. Only AFTER this did I actually go and check how much paving stones (and the like) were at Kent. Would you believe they're bloody 24$ a linear foot! Yes, indeed, my one hundred foot long half wall would cost me nearly $2500. Pfft. Like hell. I now need to find a way to build a half wall for about 300-500$. Ideas so far: stack slate-like material (stolen from some quarry), mortar wall with medium sized rounded stones (likewise acquired for little/no money), a wooden half-wall backed with 1" gravel for drainage, two dozen or so gigantic stones rolled into place and gathered from god knows where, etc. I'm still working on it.

Also in the "deals" department: late last week we picked up a desk for the office from kijiji.ca ($25), and a two-year old double mattress with boxspring and metal frame for ($50). I'm especially psyched about the desk since I had decided I wanted an L-shaped desk in a dark wood finish without a hutch to eventually write my thesis on. But I could NOT find one to save my life. And I'm not talking "I couldn't find a cheap one"...no...I mean I checked every online site (canadian tire, costco, staples, leons, ebay, overstock, everywhere!) and could not find one save for a $1500 real cherry desk available only in the States. But then I checked kijiji and lo and behold, a 25-year old sturdy mf'er for under 30$. And the purchase of these used items started the downward spiral of furniture shopping to fill the new house. We've bought curtains and curtain rods for all the windows, and I needed to get a bedspread and co-ordinating items for the guest bedroom. Next on the list: a headboard for the spare room (purchased for under 100$ or possibly created by me by tufting a square upholstered piece of plywood) and a new (bigger and darker stained) dining set. Husband would like to seat six and we spent this weekend at Pier 1, Leons and online looking over possible designs. I originally wanted rattan parson chairs like this one to go with our current (but refinished, in my pipe dream) hefty wooden table :

But then hubby pointed out that 1) this material is likely to get real ugly after a few years wear 2) for the price of six chairs (about 90$/chair on clearance sale) we could buy a whole set including table at a "regular" furniture store. They would look great, but they ARE somewhat "trendy" and I would probably want to replace them in three years. Oh and plus, there are only four left this side of Quebec (in Newfoundland so I'd have to pay to ship them here, which the sales lady tried to convince me was actually quite reasonable. Right.)
So then we went to a few "regular" furniture stores to pick out something boring like this:

Which was actually alot more reddish in the store. And although the price is better (700$ for six chairs and the table) it's just so damn boring.
Third vision was to keep the current table, refinish dark as originally planned and buy six parson chairs, which may hold up better and would not be replaced for at least five years like these ones:

Only problem with this plan is that my husband LOATHES microsuede and every single parson chair I can find is either microsuede or really dark brown bicast leather (>>monochrome boring blech).

So back to kijiji. We might go check this set out tomorrow night. It is cheaper than a new store bought set by far, and is so traditional that it will stand the test of time, design wise. My only concern is that it is too formal. i can convince myself either way.



And also, I'm getting dangerously close to doing something crazy to my hair again. And since I covet this hair, I may try purple or blue streaks with big bouncy artificial curls soon:

And I need to book my appointment for my first tattoo too (something like this):


being stuck in the lab all day makes me want to do silly things.

Burn Out

Three months. That’s how long I take to burn out on a project (the house, in this case). I might’ve lasted longer if not for the blasted vapour barrier. The 6 mm sheets of plastic, that wrap the entire house in an unbroken bubble of un-weatherness, broke me. It was supposed to take one week, maybe two weekends…but that was four weeks ago. So so so long ago. It went deceptively fast at first, when my mom was here helping. The great sheets of plastic covered entire square walls quickly. But the closets, corners, ceilings and (especially) the finicky first floor ceiling where the open web joists provided foot upon foot of detailed taping and caulking were too much. When we build another house, I won’t be doing the vapour barrier. No siree.

So now we are at the end of month three of construction. We both work full time jobs, come home at night, eat supper and then head back out to the house for three hours of work (a couple nights a week). When we don’t go directly to the house, we run around paying people/ordering supplies/checking out sales. Weekends we wake up at 7 am and stay until supper time. By Easter weekend, we were desperate for a break so we said Screw It and left for New Brunswick to spend the weekend with our extended families. It was great.

Nothing has really changed at the house, so there are not cool pictures to add.Well, the basement floor was finally poured so we have been framing /insulating that. Pictures to come later.

Last Thursday a shipment of stuff for the house arrived from the States. Included were bath accessories for upstairs and down (towel rack, TP holder, etc.), faucets for kitchen/both baths/shower, all interior door handles & one hefty exterior door handle. I was adamant about getting oil rubbed bronze finishes for door handles/faucets/lighting fixtures but our budget was tight. I did find a spot online that would ship for a reasonable fee their collection of oil-rubbed bronze items. Their gimmick is that by buying all from the same place, the oil-rubbed bronze finishes will be uniform (they can vary quite a bit, even in stores). So they arrived on Thursday and I’m unhappy with some items (the lav faucets, shower faucets and exterior door handle don’t match the rest & are ugly matte black). Must now either decide to 1) keep the ugly finishes or 2) spend more money to return the items and get new ones (also from the store since they sell another similar shade called “antique copper” which may be closer to what I’m looking for and still 1/3 the price of anything we could find around here). Don’t know, need to call Mississippi tonight. The carbon footprint of this stuff off the net will effectively negate any green purchases we’ve made so far. Boo for that.

Drywall is being delivered tomorrow morning. Since it took so fracking long to do the vapour barrier, we’ve abandoned our plans to put up the drywall ourselves. It is the outermost layer visible to us/guests, so we felt okay justifying the expense. Also, I don’t think I had the mental reserve to attack the drywall ourselves. That much detail + too little experience = near breakdown. Worth 3000$ I’d say. Not to mention that fact that the people we have hired will take 2x five day weeks to complete the house so I can’t even begin to guess how long it would have taken us. Way worth it.


The end is near. Drywall, paint, floor, cabinets, plumbing – We’re in!

Pink and Gray - the New Black

Lately (the past two weeks) it is lovely, sunny and sometimes cold during the week. But then bam! the weekend comes and it's sheets of rain or shitloads of snow. But you don't really know it's coming because the weather stations have no clue. No. Clue.
On Tuesday I checked the weather for Friday. The weather channel was predicting 3 degrees celsius. Environment Canada was calling for minus 3 degrees. A span of six degrees for the same day and the same town. WTF? Might as well toss a coin. Last week one website was calling for -1 on Saturday the other for +6. That's a huge difference. Frozen fingers while putting up siding without gloves vs. toasty fingers putting up siding. I've gotten to the point where I don't even look now. Prepare for everything by bringing lots of extra clothing, and do the work no matter what the weather is like. Gotta be done.

Last weekend my mom came up as well as my husband's parents. We started the insulation and got most of it complete on Saturday. On Sunday we continued the insulation and started the vapour barrier. My husband, mom & boyfriend and I all took Monday off, so we continued to work inside the house as well as on the siding outside.


Pink insulation. Gets in your eyes and lungs. Little sticky shards of glass, which we protected ourselves against using masks and goggles. Not only was it terribly stiffling, but since it was cold in the house our goggles would fog up constantly.


Vapour barrier and tuck tape, stuck to the corners with acoustical sealant. Black sticky glue that never dries ever.

Last night we returned to the house to put insulating foam board in the basement. The pink foam will go under the poured concrete floor, helping to insulate against heat loss.





Yesterday forecasters were predicting 2-4 cm of snow overnight. You know how much actually fell? About 10 cm at the house. I took the pictures below half way through the night when it hadn't even stopped snowing yet. I was talking to a woman in the department who lives out by Peggy's Cove. Her son measured the snow on their deck this morning at 21 cm. Bloody big difference between shoveling 2 cm of snow and 20 cm of snow...

Minor catastrophes

Last week the electricians came to rough-in the house. Our plumber, who also does HVAC (heating, ventilation, air conditioning) came around a second time to install the air ducts and the heat-recovery unit.


Washer & Dryer hook-up, downstairs bath



Purty wires



Telephone/internet/cable hook-up



More purty wires



Ventilation ducts and pot lights in kitchen


We had hoped to be in a position to insulate last weekend, but the inspectors for the electrical (run by a provincial, not municipal, office) have a decidedly less flexible schedule than the municipal office, so we couldn’t get an appointment until Tuesday of this week. Last weekend, we took a break. The in-laws stayed home, and we relaxed the way good nerds do: we watched Lord of the Rings trilogy while scarfing nachos & white wine on the couch.



So the electrical inspection went well on Tuesday. Everything passed – good to go.

We also scheduled our municipal inspection of plumbing/mechanical/framing for yesterday. That went not so well. We arrived last night (in disgusting sleeting rain) to find two reports: one for plumbing, the other for framing. The inspection report for the plumbing had only one minor suggestion (to support a pipe). It’ll take ten minutes and one piece of two foot strapping.

The framing inspection had half a page of text, listing all the things that would be needed before we could insulate. While most could conceivably be completed with one day of diligent work, there was one glaring problem. Our windows (plural) in the bedrooms (plural) did not meet egress. This is carpenter-speak for bad news. The inspector figured our windows were not up to code, being too small for the size of the rooms and not a suitable exit vehicle for emergencies like fire. The fix?? All new windows in the bedrooms, at a cost of several thousand (not to mention three weeks lag time). Of course, we were bummed, so we went to a sit-down restaurant and drowned our sorrows in greasy garlic goodness, and then walked around the mall (the food cheered him up, the shopping me). And last night, when we got home, my husband meticulously checked over our measurements, comparing them to his national code book. I was sleepy with food, dozing/reading in bed when he finally came to bed mumbling that as far as he could tell, we DID meet code. Me: “So we’ll see tomor…Zzzz….”.

This morning husband called the inspector. Nonchalantly, dude quips something like “Oh, well, when I came back to the office and double checked my numbers I found that you are within code.” WTF?!? We were freaking out over nothing. Thanks, bastard. You owe me forty bucks for dinner at a pizza joint, and if you could take back the 1800 calories that would be nice too. Kthanx.

So all looks bright and sunny again. I’m taking off from work tomorrow so that I can help get the place ready for insulating. My mum is coming down! My mum is coming down!

Which reminds me that I will also be spending lots of time cleaning up the pit we call our apartment. Ohmygodgivemestrength. Egads.

Chilly weekends = chills from a head cold

The view from the apartment on Monday, after the snow last Sunday

Last weekend was a quiet one around the house - no major updates just small things that needed to get finished. These included putting the two basement windows in, installing the sliding patio door & the front door and cleaning the house of wood scraps/construction waste. The kitchen cabinet person came by for measurements. We were supposed to start shingling the roof as well - all the materials were on hand and the elaborate staging was in put in place. But then it started to snow, which hampered the shingling. This is the last step that needs to be complete prior to out second draw for our mortgage, which means we can't get money until it is done. The options were to take three weekends and do it ourselves (weather permitting) or hire someone to do it for us for $1000 in a few days. We went with the latter, and they are almost all done. The plumber was in this past week and has pretty much finished the rough in too. As soon as the roof is 100% complete, we will contact our mortgage person for an inspection.


One piece bathtub, with robin's egg blue finish


Just kidding. Blue protective film, which will be removed to reveal white finish, from the other side


Playing in the snow at the house last weekend. My mother-in-law and I made a big box out of scrap plywood to hold excess wood (headed for the fireplace, one day soon). We put Tyvek on the bottom of it so it would slide easily on the snow. It turned into a sled when I jumped inside and my husband gave me a push.

My in-laws have been visiting and helping every weekend for almost two months. My mother has offered her help as well, but feels she is better suited to indoor work like insulating and drywall (although I'm sure she would kick ass at anything we asked her to do). So...I want to get her/my uncle/other family members up here to help March 1st weekend to drywall. Many, many things must occur before this can happen. Namely, the electrician must come in (which he will only do when the home is roof tight) and finish his rough-in in time for a municipal inspection. It will be a tight squeeze. But if it happens - we'll be rocking, time-line wise. Although we closed on the lot in mid-October, we really only started building the first week of January, so it hasn't even been two months yet.


Roofing

And despite battling a head cold, I was out helping install vinyl siding on the house. Not my personal fav as a siding option, but cedar shingles are time-consuming and expensive so we'll save those for our "real house" and not the one we plan on selling. It was nice to do something that gave observable progress. After last weekend, we needed a psychological boost and siding was the way to go, even though it really didn't need to be done now.


Installing vinyl siding on the back (I'm on the very left)


Vinyl siding from the front,with basement windows


A picture of the two walls of vinyl siding that I measured, cut, and installed all by myself!

The weather was mostly cold, but sunny (except for the last hour on Sunday). The wind was chilly, maybe - 15 Celsius and I had to warm up in the car every 45 minutes which was relatively often compared to colder days when I could stay out for longer. I blame my illness - it makes sense to me that my body would be hoarding blood for sick internal organs and view my limbs as expendable. Fucking freezing though, my feet felt like frozen stones the whole weekend, and would hurt when I would thaw them out in the car (picture included of our set-up; a plug-in portable heater sitting in the front-seat of the van. Hmmm...toasty).

Toe-defroster

And the neatest part of the weekend: our neighbours went skating on the pond behind out house. Yay!

Skating neighbour.


Check it out (narration provided by yours truly, nasally from the head cold no less...enjoy!):

Pictures

Building mini-roof in livingroom in the rain

Different angle

Our casement windows from Piercey's - no grills.

The frou-frou front door insert. It was the last one , so it was a discount buy. Not my favorite glass insert, but not bad.


Looking in from the front door, into the future laundry room/guest bath.

Standing in the laundry room/guest bath

Bay in dining "room" (more like a nook, really)

Standing in the bay, looking out to the future kitchen (currently storing the windows) and the entry area

From bay to stairwell/livingroom area

Plywood stairwell

Looking up from stairwell landing to second floor

Looking down from stairwell into dining nook (note the two inches of water we had to sweep away on Saturday...)

Bedroom #1 with lake view

Close up of lake in backyard

"Hall" - Master bedroom on left, bedroom #1 at the end, bedroom #2 on the right

Upstairs family bath

Master bedroom view from stairs (with unfinished chimney)

Master bedroom

Master bedroom window - looks out onto the industrial park (and, hopefully one day in Spring, a big tree!)

Tyvek on the back of the house