Category Archives: Home Renovations

I’m not dumb but I can’t understand how he lifts me in the air just by raising his hand

Posted on by

It has CONTINUED to be summer around here, which is leading me to wonder where I am and to also SEIZE THE DAY, so there has been lots of swimming and outdoor activity around the Boyhouse.  There has also been lots of discussions about Star Wars. 

My kids talk about Star Wars all the time.  In the mornings, they play Star Wars Wii, and then the rest of the day, no matter what we are doing, they talk about Star Wars Wii.  They talk about the Star Wars movies and the Clone Wars and they spew out facts to me in a very intense way.  Jake spent his allowance on books about the Clone Wars and now they quiz me about bounty hunters and padawans and other things that I cannot remember because I have no more room in my brain.  Children, my brain is already filled with every song lyric ever written, I cannot make room for Star Wars.  Also I appear to have a mental block about it, to their frustration.  Mom, that’s Count DOOKU.  He’s bad.  No, that guy is a Jedi!  Jedis are GOOD.

They like to watch YouTube videos about Star Wars and then act them out while watching them, which is both cute – especially when Jake is Anakin turning into Darth Vader, the intensity with which he does this – and also a bit alarming.  I mean, isn’t there a whole subculture involving live action role playing?  I sure hope my kids don’t turn out like these guys.  But, I guess if they did, I wouldn’t have to worry about becoming a grandma prematurely, if you know what I mean.  Silver linings everywhere, people.

On Thursday we were stuck at home, waiting for the shower door people to install our shower doors.  Have you noticed I haven’t been talking about our renovations for a while?  That’s because they completely stalled two weeks ago.  The contractor kept teasing me with shower door installation dates.  I cancelled dinner guests, I waited at home, I cleared my schedule, only to find out that the doors were not yet ready, and they would be installed another day.  I kept looking at the bathroom, so close to being finished and yet so far.  But on Thursday, they were certainly going to be installed, I was assured.  And so while we were waiting I dressed the children’s stuffies in their own clothing – hilarity ensued – and watched fan videos of Weird Al’s Yoda on YouTube. 

Sometimes I look at my daily activities and feel a deep sense of whatever the opposite of accomplishment is.  As an aside, this video is deemed to be the best version, by both me and the boys. 

The shower door installation people did show up, but I sensed something was wrong when I heard a lot of arguing in a language I did not understand, plus a number of panicked sounding phone calls.  Any time I walked past the bathroom, the installers would fall completely silent and stare at me.  It was quite unnerving.  Finally one of them handed me his cell phone, and the man on the other end explained that the shower doors were cut incorrectly and so they would be reinstalled next week.

Sigh.  The Dark Side is looking pretty good right now. 

It’s Coming From Inside The House!

Posted on by

How was your weekend?  Normally my weekends are fairly uneventful, but this weekend was the exception to the rule.  A while back, the CBC was having a fundraiser for the Calgary Food Bank, and my girlfriends and I managed to purchase an evening with local celebrity and food goddess extraordinaire Julie van Rosendaal, from Dinner with Julie!  Squee!  It was so much fun.  There’s nothing like drinking wine and hanging with the girls, am I right?  The thing is, it never really happens much.  Friday nights normally see me in my pajamas, drinking wine on the couch – and during the golf season, often that means I’m drinking wine on the couch by myself, watching NYPD Blue, which is a teensy bit depressing once I see that written down.  So, it was so much fun – we all dressed up a little bit, and I think we probably startled Julie with our zeal (WE LOVE YOU, JULIEEEEEE!).  Although, my girlfriend who hosted mentioned to me this morning that she could see me visibly fade after nine o’clock, and I was the first person to mention that it was now time to go home.  Could she blame me?  By ten o’clock I had been up for over seventeen hours, and after a few glasses of wine…zzzzzz….

Saturday dawned grey and rainy; of course – it was Super Soccer Saturday!  There’s nothing quite like having a soccer tournament in the pouring rain.  Fortunately the rain tapered to a drizzle and eventually let up.  Unfortunately the field in places was just completely sodden.  The kids had fun, I had enough layers and rain wear on that I didn’t freeze, and my life as a soccer mom is now over, so happiness all around.

How can you resist such a face?  He is also my hero of the day, and here’s the story.  First, I need you to understand, dear reader, that a phobia is a phobia.  Some of us have fears that may or may not have grounding in reality.  They may seem unreasonable or silly to others, but they are very real to the phobic person.  I have a phobia of moths.
They are such freaky things, and they flutter so spastically.  I am TERRIFIED of them, and as far as I can tell they do nothing of particular merit in the insect world.  They are just gross and ugly and I hate them the end.  Anyway, since we have been having work done on the house, the doors are frequently left open, and on Saturday afternoon I was calmly cleaning up the kitchen from lunch and a MOTH FLUTTERED RIGHT IN MY FACE AND THEN FLUTTERED AROUND THE SINK.  I don’t know what you would do in that situation, but what I did was scream my husband’s name over and over at the top of my lungs.  His lack of response then spurred me to run down the stairs, where the kids were very calmly playing and were disturbingly not at all bothered by my hysterical screaming.  “Where’s your dad where’s your DAD?” I shrieked, not waiting for them to answer before I burst into the bathroom where he was showering, effectively putting him into cardiac arrest.  By the time he dried off (slowly) and made his way upstairs, the moth was nowhere to be found.
The only thing worse than having a moth in the house is not knowing the whereabouts of said moth.
“It could be anywhere!” I whispered to my husband, as he walked from room to room, looking.  The moth was nowhere to be found.  A guy was actually working on our bathroom at the time, a huge and quiet guy referred to universally as “D”.  My husband explained the situation to the somewhat bewildered fellow, who reassured me that he hadn’t seen a moth, but if he did, he would squish it immediately.  After a while, my husband gave up the search, although I continued to creep suspiciously from room to room.  “It must have made its way outside!” he said cheerfully, although I thought, darkly, that he was saying this to placate me. 
This morning the moth showed up.  It must have hidden under the food processor.  I moved it out of the way to plug in the blender this morning, when the moth made its appearance.  I was making a smoothie for Mark’s breakfast, and he was fairly alarmed when I started screaming.  I took a deep breath, told him I needed him to be really brave, and to get the moth.  He grabbed a tissue, ran to the window where the moth was fluttering, and squished it!  My brave, big boy! 
And here I was, fretting at the speed at which children grow up.  There’s nothing quite so satisfying as having a big kid who can squish moths for me.   

Adventures in Shopping

Posted on by

So far, it has been a very strange day.  I will say that, although I am very happy at the hard working contractors and their willingness to put in extra time to get the job done (GIT ER DUN), I am starting to get very TIRED of having people in the house all the time.  The noise level is high, no matter what task they are accomplishing.  Between the tile saw, regular saws, Shop Vac, hammers, floor scraper or what-have-you, and the near-constant LOUD VOICES USING THE OPPOSITE OF POSITIVE REINFORCEMENT, the noise is getting to me.  For two days, a tiler was here, and he whistled the entire time.  THE ENTIRE TIME.  He whistled little off-tune songs, and it just kept going.  Finally I thought I would turn on some music in an attempt to drown out the whistling.  This turned out to be a mistake of epic proportions.  The tiler proceeded to whistle along to the music, but NOT WELL.  By the time my husband got home from work on Friday I had already had worked my way through the beers in the fridge and was frantically opening a bottle of wine.  Then – THEN – the tiler showed up to work before eight o’clock on Saturday morning, while I was still in the shower.  Fortunately my husband was home but the tiler saw me in my robe, which is always an awkward situation.  A friend thought maybe I could write about it a la 50 Shades of Tiling but NO. 

I’m going a bit crazy here.

In any event, I have been tasked with the choosing of a mirror, light fixture, and various towel rack implements.  My job, as given to me by the head contractor, was to go to Home Depot and choose all these things, write down the SKU numbers, and then report back in order for him to purchase them.  It seems a little, I don’t know, could we cut out the middle man here, but yet I am an obedient renovator and so I do as I am told.  I headed to the Home Depot this morning – after a routinely unpleasant, but not excessively so, trip to Walmart – and I will say this: there are no adjectives to adequately express how poorly equipped I am for a solo trip to Home Depot.  For one thing, I am only recently able to go to Costco on my own without heart-pounding anxiety that I am going to die from crushing by falling warehouse objects.  For another thing, I am easily overwhelmed.  Trips to places like Bed, Bath and Beyond, for me, start off with the simple need for a toothbrush holder, and end up with me wondering if I need a three-tiered shoe rack or a Jelly Belly ice shaver/syrup set; then I get so overwhelmed by the choices and massive amount of landfill-destined items that I leave empty handed, and still in need of a toothbrush holder. 

In any case, I headed to Home Depot, assuming a confidence that I didn’t feel, and I found the department that had the bathroom fixtures.  I immediately phoned my husband at work, near tears, saying I didn’t know how I could possibly choose a mirror.  I started to unravel, like if I chose the wrong mirror the consquences would be dire indeed: the entire renovation would be for naught, all our money and time will have been wasted, and we may as well have kept our mouldy old bathroom.  He talked me off of the mirror-choosing ledge (“Sweetie, I’m going into a meeting.  Can we talk about this later?”) and then I proceeded to raise the suspicions of many, many Home Depot employees by walking around shakily photographing things on my iPhone and making notes of the SKU numbers.  “Can I HELP you?” the orange-aproned people kept asking me, to which I responded, cheerfully “No thanks!”.  They probably thought I was one of those secret shoppers, or maybe a spy from Lowe’s. 

To add to the strangeness of this day, I brought the boys home for lunch and Jake scarfed down a sandwich, a glass of milk, and then requested half of a Caramilk bar that he had been saving.  Sure!  Why not!  After he scarfed that down and I was driving them back to school, Jake mentioned, casually, that he was going to barf.  The bees are doing what now?  I pulled over and let Jake out, when he barfed in the gutter like a miniature drunk.  Meanwhile, Mark kept asking, “Are you almost done barfing?  I don’t want to be late for school.”  Points for punctuality, although maybe not for empathy.  Although I knew he wasn’t sick, he had just eaten too quickly, I of course wasn’t going to send my just-barfed kid back to school.  So I dropped Mark off after extracting promises that he would pick up Jake’s backpack and spelling homework, and took my now-fine kid home.  Even though I had plans to pick up milk and fruit, and I still needed a goddamn toothbrush holder.

I settled Jake on the couch with a blanket and the “Quackbusters” movie, when the head contractor came to talk to me.  He told me, very seriously, that they had finally removed the toilet from the upstairs bathroom and now all the contractors would have to use the downstairs bathroom.  Which is fine, of course, except that things are a little awkward when I am working on the computer and not twenty feet away from me someone is having a bowel movement.  And doesn’t use the fan.  Which is what just happened.

I’m just saying, this has been a very strange day.  And it’s only 2:30!  I can’t wait to see what the dinner hour brings. 

And this is what my life has become

Posted on by

I swore I wouldn’t write another post about the renovation, and yet it consumes me, dear reader.  My life is swallowed by the renovation, and the working around the contractor’s schedule, and the I need to choose a light fixture thinking that I have right now.  I’m even boring myself.  Be thankful you don’t need to enter into boring conversation with me on a daily basis – or if you do, and you’re reading this, I’m sorry for being so boring. 

Yesterday the bathroom was completely gutted – save for the toilet, a relief since I had a mid-level worry that someone would spontaneously contract a virulent stomach flu and would have to be herded, barfing, down the carpeted stairs to the basement bathroom, not that we have even had the stomach flu for the longest time (knock knock knocking on the hardwood floor) – the rock was chiseled off the fireplace, and the front entry tiles were removed.  Prior to this, the head contractor told me There will be some dust and noise.  INDEED.  Barkley and I hid downstairs, for the most part, since it was pouring rain and I needed to be on hand in case of questions.  At one point the air in the house was white with fine dust, and after the task was completed and I was trying to set a world record on Number Of Times One Can Clean The Same Floor Area In A Four Hour Period, dust still magically reappeared.  Perhaps it was just hanging in the air waiting for me to finish cleaning before landing, yet again, or perhaps it was asexually reproducing; I don’t know.  All I know is that I have turned into a dusty Lady Macbeth, but without the mur-diddly-urder.  So not really like Lady Macbeth at all. 

How is your June going?  A large number of my friends greet June with great dread, due to all the year-end parties and wrap-ups and recitals and whatnot.  It’s not a bad month for me; the only thing I really have going on is Super Soccer Saturday, which is really just half a day, and only involves a small amount of volunteer effort on my part.  I did panic at one point and asked my friend who was organizing the volunteers if she had me scheduled to cook the hot dogs, and so, could I NOT cook the hot dogs, and she looked at me like I was crazy and assured me that she never, ever thought of having me cook the hot dogs, at which information I was greatly relieved.  WHEW.  So things are not bad, June-wise.  I mean, except for the dust and all.

Have you ever had one of those moments of incredulity, where you wonder This is what my life has come down to?  How did this happen?  I’m having one of those moments RIGHT THIS VERY SECOND.

I am speaking at our school’s kindergarten orientation tonight, to drum up interest about the School Council and Parent Association.  Oh, ha ha ha ha!  Good times.  The parents at the kindergarten orientation are generally more full of angst that their baby is heading to kindergarten/ relief that their child has made it to kindergarten to be genuinely interested in helping to weed the naturalization area, but you never know.  I am FULL OF OPTIMISM that someone will want to assauge their feelings of lost babyhood by rashly signing up for something. 

My neighbour – Beeps‘ “daddy” – informed me excitedly that we have new neighbours.  We do?  I didn’t realize.  I am home all day long, how could I not notice something like a new neighbour?  I wondered if I was just cluelessly going about my day, not noticing a moving truck, but he was referring to the new tenants in the rental house across the alley from me.  Oh, I said, did you meet them?  Well, not the people, he said.  But, he said, in the excited voice that adults everywhere talk to small children, there’s a puppy and a kitty!  I wondered how old Beeps’ “daddy” thinks I am, and if I should be flattered or alarmed.  Later I did notice a large, friendly looking black dog in the yard.  I immediately wondered if I should go introduce myself to the new neighbours.  Perhaps I should warn them about Beeps’ idiocy and propensity to escape.  You never know, they may need to borrow a shovel. 

Enjoy the Silence

Posted on by

Now that the kitchen is done, which may have been the fastest, most efficient kitchen renovation known to man, the contractors are going to demolish our main floor bathroom, entryway, and fireplace, starting Wednesday.  Originally they were going to start last Friday, but not all materials were in.  So Wednesday it is, which means I am going to have had six days of relative silence.  The excessive cursing shall start Wednesday!  And then my mother-in-law is coming for a visit on Thursday.  Cue excessive drinking.

But oh, I am so happy with my kitchen.  I have been cooking things almost non-stop, I love it so.  I want to make out with it, and maybe go all the way and have little kitchen babies with it.  This is how I love you, kitchen.  And so I’m sure that the bathroom, entryway, and fireplace renovation will go very smoothly and I will love them all equally, but differently, when it’s all said and done.  RIGHT? 

I am a little worried, however, since the contractor told me to “expect some dust”.  Now, the kitchen renovation was pretty gross and dusty.  How gross and dusty is my house going to be?  The gross/dustiness peaked when the electrician cut holes in the ceiling to put in potlights, and had three different kinds of insulation – including wood chips – fall out all over the floor, counters, and, evidently the entire house.  I was finding little wood chips and pieces of insulation in parts of the house completely irrelevant to the kitchen. 

See?  For someone who’s as FLY as me, or for anyone for that matter, all that dust…all that clutter…I was a bit of a tense mess.  PASS THE WINE. 

I promised before and after pictures, and so here they are – drum roll?

Before:

Note the fridge, in all it’s artistic glory.  Also note how neat the countertops are.  That’s because I had to move everything:

Here’s a shot with the granite in, but nothing else:

And here’s a shot with the backsplash in…lighting, flooring and appliances to come:

What’s that on the island?  A cosmopolitan?  I needed a little something something after days of BANG BANG BANG *sound of air compressor* BANG BANG BANG LEVEL THE FUCKING TILES BANG BANG BANG *sound of saws* BRING ME A FUCKING HACKSAW. 

Speaking of appliances, the plumber who delivered and installed the dishwasher was fairly young, heavily tattooed, and looked like he spent all his free time in the gym.  His name was Lester.  Does that seem strange to anyone else? 

Anyway, here are the pictures of the final product:

And me, super super super excited to have six days of silence before the NEXT project! 

Stay tuned for the next thrilling episode!

A few of HIS least favourite things.

Posted on by

My kitchen is done!  My kitchen is done!  I was feeling a bit concerned yesterday, and the day before, when a somewhat comical series of events took place that made the flooring installation take a full day longer than anticipated (“Hm.  Well.  This is going to complicate things.” the flooring guy said more times than I am comfortable with.)  I am extremely happy with the final product and I will post before and after pictures very soon, but today is Friday and I’m feeling a bit silly – giddy, even – and I have beer! because it’s a sunny day! and it’s a Friday! and the before pictures are on my other computer and I am just too silly, giddy, lazy, and beer-y to retrieve them.

The other day my husband and I were watching Modern Family and I pointed out the owl shaped cookie jar in their kitchen.  I had seen the same one on the anthropologie website, and I thought it was cute – outrageously overpriced, but cute.

“Please tell me you didn’t buy that.” my husband said.  Now.  I had no intentions of buying it – I don’t use cookie jars, and that particular cookie jar is $98, plus shipping and duties, and I think we can all agree that is an excessive price to pay for a cookie jar, when a Tupperware container does a much better job at keeping cookies fresh.  However, I thought – and still think – it’s adorable, but the vigor with which my husband opposed my way of thinking made me realize that, sometimes, we really are from different planets.
Mars and Venus, if you will.
I never actually read any of those books, for the record.  But I was inspired to make a list of things I love that my husband hates.  Hey, we could make a meme out of it!  Anyone want in?  Anyone?  Anyone? 
Things I Love That My Husband Hates
1. Kale chips.  I know!  How is that possible?  But, upon gamely trying some, he has said, and this is a direct quote, “GAH.  That is the worst thing I have ever eaten.” 
2. My favourite retro radio station that caters to old people.  What can I say, he is not a fan of 70s ballads.  He is also not a fan of listening to me sing along to 70s ballads in the car.  Baby I’m a want you.  
3. Speaking of retro, he’s not a fan of anything that could be described as retro, vintage-look, or antique.  He doesn’t like old things.  “But I like you, and you’re old!” I say to him, which is nearly always answered with a look only.  He also dislikes anything that can be described as kitchy.  In other words, he hates my new tea towel:


 
It says “Just Married”!  Sweet, right?  Following is the conversation we had about this tea towel.
Me: It’s so cute!  Just Married!
Husband: Why would you get something that says Just Married? 
Me: Don’t you think it’s cute?
Husband: But we’ve been married for ten years.
Me: But we’re in love just like we were just married!
Husband: *nonplussed silence*
4. This outfit:
This super comfortable outfit, he hates.  It’s not the little sweater.  It’s not the cropped leggings.  It’s this shirt:
“It looks like a maternity shirt!” he tells me, which is almost enough to dissuade me from wearing it.  And yet, I wear it still.  That shit is comfortable.  Someone mentioned that men universally dislike the empire waistline, from a “Is she knocked up?” point of view, which may be accurate.  I know that when I was pregnant, I mostly waddled around enjoying all the attention I received, in addition to eating eleven meals a day, while my husband worried about me.  So he may have a bit of PTSD from those days.  Still, I think the top is cute.  By the way, that’s the new flooring in the background.  Squee!
5. The people who do the weather and traffic reports on the morning news.  Okay, I don’t LOVE them, but I don’t actively hate them, either.  Given the chance I think that my husband would set them on fire. 
So, do you want to join in my Friday night meme?  Things you love but your significant other does not?  Good times, people, good times. 

Mr. Wilder, the Gangsta of Malone

Posted on by

A fully functional kitchen plus a couple of rainy, miserable days equals KITCHEN PARTY!  I spent yesterday making granola – hippie me – baking cookies, chopping fruit and veggies, and making hummous that would make you cry tears of joy.  Well, it made ME cry tears of joy.  I was skeptical – who puts yogurt into hummous? – but it was the greatest hummous I ever consumed, no hyperbole.  I need to put it on the cooking blog – which right now has back-to-back cupcake recipes on it, so you should really be checking it out anyway just for the porny cupcake photos.  My husband has a new portrait lens in his camera and I didn’t know how to change that, so I had fun taking some arty pictures of peanut butter/chocolate cupcakes. 

Sigh.  It was only yesterday that I was kitchen party-ing.  I miss my kitchen so much.  Today the electrician came to put in new lighting and there are currently giant holes in the ceiling and much woodchips and insulation scattered all over the floor.  Lalalala.  How much longer until I can crack open that wine bottle?  Ever since giving up booze on weekdays, I appreciate Friday nights so much.  SO VERY MUCH. 

A few months back the boys were reading Little House on the Prairie in their class, and they asked me to read them the other titles in the series.  SCORE!  Pretty excited to not be reading another Geronimo Stilton or Magic Tree House, I dug out my old box set of Laura Ingalls Wilder books, and we read Little House in the Big Woods.  Why, oh, why did the Ingalls leave the Big Woods?  It all sounded so lovely and cozy, what with the excitement of blowing up a pig’s bladder like a balloon and eating a roasted pig’s tail, and going to a sugaring-off dance, and having both a corncob doll AND a rag doll.  Every other book is a tale of narrow death escapes and crippling poverty and malnutrition. 

But now we’re reading Farmer Boy and it is both heartwarming and horrifying.  On the one hand, I greatly prefer wealthy, businessman-like, pillar-of-the-community Mr. Wilder to flighty, keeps-putting-his-family-in-constant-danger Pa.  For one thing, there is always lots of food.  The food descriptions in that book reach food-porn levels.  If Almanzo was alive today, maybe he’d be a food blogger.  There would be lots of pictures of pie, we know that much.  So that’s kind of nice, compared with the Ingalls’ meals of bread and molasses, with salt pork fat if they are lucky. Plus, Mr. Wilder is kind of a badass.  Remember that it is Mr. Wilder’s blacksnake whip that is lent to the teacher so that the teacher can beat the living hell out of the disruptive boys who intend to murder the him and dissolve the school?  Just like they did the previous year?  Kind of makes the kids nowadays who speak in class without putting their hands up look like pussies, no?

Old-timey life seems pretty grim, even for a well-to-do family like the Wilders, doesn’t it?  The joy and excitement of the tin-peddlar’s annual visit.  The constant drudgery and field work.  The cutting of ice blocks and packing of said ice blocks into the ice house at forty below temperatures.  Walking around in shoes that don’t fit because the cobbler was late in arriving.  I mean, it kind of sucks.  It makes me feel bad for even complaining that my kitchen is currently covered with drywall dust and insulation.  Soon, the kitchen will be cleaned up, and I will be eating the world’s greatest hummous and making my way through a nice bottle of shiraz, so what is there to complain about, really?