Our Domicile

One of the things that has held us back from painting the house all these years has been a general lack of direction on house colours. To be perfectly honest, I’ve always seen the house as a buttery yellow with a nice crisp red door. Miss P agreed with me on this, but Martin has had some reservations about that scheme, not the least of which being a rather uncharacteristic distaste for the red door (Martin is generally entirely partial to the colour red). His rather un-Martin like red avoidance in this instance has to do with the fact that a lot of houses in our neighbourhood have red doors. They all look great, but Martin likes to do everything just a little bit differently. At one point I suggested painting the  house a mocha-y brown with a hot pink door and front stairs, but that idea never got much traction. We kept coming back to the yellow scheme, which really I think would have looked rather cute on our little dwelling, and then just a few days after we decided we were really going to take the plunge and hire someone, our neihbours just down the street painted their house that exact same colour scheme. Given Martin’s penchant for originality, that was the end of the yellow house.

Our friend Inga has suggested that since the house is such a distinctive colour of green, and being as how it’s on a corner and is almost surely used as a bit of a local landmark, along the lines of “You know, that green house? The one on the corner? Well turn left there…”. We can tell that the house has always been green, so Inga had suggested that we just update the green house, otherwise people will just always refer to it as “the house on the corner… you know, the one that used to be green”, which is almost certainly true. Unfortunately, we’ve experienced more tears and frustration over the selection and application of green paint in our house than I care to relive and so we’re a bit gunshy when it comes to green paint. That and the lovely folks at the other end of the block just painted their house the colour of green we would likely have gone for (damn keeping up with the neighbours I tell ya). And so it is that we’ve decided to go with a rather uncharacteristic and admittedly somewhat neutral colour scheme, using a brownish grey (Sherwin William’s “Mink”) as the primary siding colour and an offwhite trim. The exciting part? The door will be orange (Sherwin Williams Daredevil), and possibly the stairs too. The idea being that every few years or so, we can change the look of the house by changing the door. This may mean that I get my hot pink door someday, or possibly lime green… We’ll see. So far, we’re still in the phase where there’s more paint removed from our house each day when we get home, so we’re still a few days away from seeing the first coat.

House photos, before painting
Originally uploaded by emira

Every year, since we bought our beloved but ramshackle domcile we have talked about painting it. Not only is the retro 50s industrial minty green colour neither of our first choice, the siding is peeling horribly all over and in great need of a fresh coat. Each Spring we start talking about colours, how long we’d need to take off work, and at one point we even inquired into borrowing painting polls and gear from some friends. But then: we delay and stall, or it simply rains all summer (last year) and it never gets done. This year we decided to bite the bullet and get some quotes to have someone else paint the house and I’m thrilled to say we’re taking that route. This will be the first major reno (and really the first job around the house aside from major plumbing or the rewiring job) that we have had any outside help on. It feels like winning the lottery. For real. While there is a sick part of me that really does love renovating, and in particular doing it with Martin, the idea of painting the house (or more correctly prepping the house for painting) never appealed to me. At all. And not having to do it, even if it means going to work instead, feels so very luxurious. I’ve taken some shots of the house after it was power-washed yesterday, and the schedule is such that by the end of this week the house should be pretty much done (save the front door which we’re replacing so won’t be painting right away). I’ll post photos daily this week with the progress just so that I can have something to look at on my lunch break to remind me of all the scraping and sanding I’m not doing. Ah bliss!

Closet before (with Pluto)
Originally uploaded by emira

I know that for most of my readers out there in internet land early July is all about the July 4th Independence Day holiday, but up here in Canada we take our July holiday on the 1st (Canada Day) and this year it kind of strangely fell on a Tuesday. This meant, in my world, taking the weekend off, going back to work on Monday and then having a mini-weekend on Tuesday. Prior to this last weekend Martin started making noise about wanting to begin our big wardrobe renovation on the weekend, which involved tearing out one wall where my bedroom closet formerly was and installing a Pax Wardrobe system (as mentioned here earlier). Given that the weekend looked to be a scorcher — and one of the first hot & sunny weekends we’d had in forever — I was having pretty much none of this and managed to delay him until the Canada Day holiday. This may not seem like such a feat, but when Martin gets a project on his mind, he’s pretty unceasing with his desire to barrel into it.

And so it was that on Tuesday morning, after a particularly brutal workout session with my new trainer (who I adore, but holy jesus can she push me), I found myself standing witness to Martin drawing a perfect 201cm by 237cm square (to fit a 200cm x 236cm Pax sliding door unit with a little wiggle room to spare) on one of our bedroom walls and then proceeding to remove that square with a borrowed reciprocating saw.

The project went remarkably smoothly. Almost unnervingly so to be totally honest. You see, in renovating an old home the idea of opening up a wall typically means opening yourself up to all kinds of unpredictable renovation adventures, everything from discovering the hard way that your closet wall is a load bearing wall to discovering unaccounted for wiring running through the walls or a lack of floor where you thought there was one. But not this time. Nope, unlike our bathroom and kitchen renos before this project, this went remarkably well. So well in fact that we finished it in a day. That’s right: a day. A day that also included lunch on the back patio, homemade dinner and hanging our clothes in the completed closet afterwards. In hindsight I believe it was possibly a Canada Day miracle.

Here’s what we actually did (and the flickr photo set that accompanies it), and a few of the small roadbumps along the way:

• Drew the line on the wall to roughly match the dimensions of the wardrobe (201cm by 237cm for a 200cm by 236cm system).
• Cut out the wall with the reciprocating saw (this part was done by Martin) and this was the messiest and nastiest part of the job. I do not like drywall dust one bit I tell you.
• Upon cutting out the wall piece we anticipated having to frame in the remainder to provide a strong support with which we could attach the assembled Pax system… but… by some miracle of the renovating gods the studs in the wall were exactly the right size. Exactly. So very exactly that we spent the entire time we were assembling the wardrobe convinced that our measurements would be wrong and it would not fit. I am so pleased to say that we were wrong.
• Then we assembled the Pax system. The one measurement we did not account for was the need for our ceiling to be at least 8cm higher than the height of the wardrobe so we could assemble it on its back and then tip it up. No such luck. We had about 4cm, max. This meant we couln’t assemble it on its side and tip it up, so we had to assemble it standing. That was a bit tricky, but not impossible.
• Once we had assembled both base units, we moved onto the sliding doors. If you go for the Pax sliding doors be prepared to assemble roughly 150 pieces per door. For real. Most are silly little rubber bits that get snugged in to make sure the glass doesn’t break/wobble, but still. There were 96 of those. For serious. At this point, we had beer.
• The system in place (and fitting in its hole) and secured to the studs, we attached the doors. At this point there were near tears. Trying to get the sliding doors to hang and then stay on their track resulted in the door falling off the track a few times with a big thud that definitely sounded like it was going to lead to broken glass. I was not happy. Eventually, this problem was overcome with the turn of a seemingly random little bit of Ikea plastic genius that was not really clearly labeled in the instructions.
• With the doors on and the system in we did a bit of a happy dance. Then I think we had dinner. Following that, we got onto putting in drawers, clothing rails etc. This was the fun part. We were on our way to hanging our clothes back up before bedtime, a milestone we hadn’t even dreamed to set.

For once, I can safely praise Ikea and say that this was an intensely rewarding reno project. We now lay in bed and gaze admiringly at our gorgeous 2 meters of unfettered closet space. We still need to repaint the bedroom (desperately), but we’re currently focused on getting the outside of the house painted, a project which I fear will somehow suck up all the bad reno juju I anticipated with the closet project. Oh how I hope not.

I'm not sure if it's quite as simple as the influence of that unreasonably dreamy walk-in closet in the Sex and the City Movie, or if it's just that we've finally reached our cumulative breaking point in trying to live with 1940s closets in 2008 (as a pair of clothes horses), but this morning Martin and I reached the closet breaking point and decided it was time to do something.

Since we moved in here three years ago, Martin has actually kept his clothes in Miss P's room closet across the hall from our bedroom, while I have occupied the main bedroom closet. Both closets are small, typical of this era of home, and not particularly awesome uses of space. My closet has a fair bit of room, but a very tiny door, so little of the room is actually usable and well Martin's is in a whole other room, making it not so useful. Plus, as Miss P gets older, she actually wants to use that closet for her own budding clothes horse lifestyle.

So, this morning, we stood in front of the wall where the closet currently exists and began positing how we could rework it. We both agree that ripping out the whole wall and making it into one large and more efficient closet in the way to go. We got out scraps of paper, measuring tapes and past issues of Dwell magazine to figure out how we'd go about making things work. The basic reno problems to solve:

• Once we rip out the full wall to open things up, we'll have a gap of wood (where thh wall once existed) on the floor in need of patching. As long as this is on the inside of the closet, that's not such a problem as it won't be too visible, but still we want it to look decent.
• Because the room is pretty small, and we want to maximize our closet space, we're best to do large sliding doors so we don't have to worry about space for doors to open. Alternatively, we can put a series of small doors in, but hanging a series of small doors in what we want to be a fairly open closet area is not a reno project that Martin's too thrilled about getting involved in.
• And, as usual, it needs to be reasonably priced, but still look good.

Just as we were about to get in the car to head to the hardware store to start figuring out our options for sliding door hardware and such, we decided to check the Ikea catalogue for ideas. We soon decided that we might be best off actually ripping out the walls and setting a Pax wardrobe system right into the removed space and basically drywalling it into place. So, instead of going to the hardware store we darted out to Ikea to take a look and at this point we're pretty sure that's what we're going to do. We can get one of the taller units at 200cm wide and it will basically fill our entire wall. That give us each 100cm of storage (roughly what we each have currently), but hopefully it will give us more usable height storage with the opening up of the closet wall (about an extra 60-70cm of usable height). Now we just need to figure out how to configure the inside, and what kind of doors we want, so if any of you are Pax users, I'd love reviews/thoughts. My questions are:

1. What are your favourite/least favourite inserts/drawers and configurations?
2. Have you tried using sliding doors with a partner? The way this would work, is that Martin and I would each have half of the system and so, if we're both using it at the same time, with the sliding doors we'd not be able to access our full closet (as the doors overlap). In order to access the full closet, the other person's door would need to be fully closed. We're leaning towards the sliding doors for space (though the four small doors would have enough room to open in our small bedroom), but I'm worried we'll end up on each other's nerves.

All thoughts and input are more than welcome. I must have renovator's amnesia, because I'm so excited about hte idea of ripping out that wall right now, I'm tempted to order pizza instead of making dinner and get out the sledge hammer…

  Miss P’s Room 
  Originally uploaded by emira

I don’t know how many eleven year olds your in current contact with, but Miss P seems to me to have pretty much everything a girl could want. For her birthday this year she got a Nintendo DS (a joint gift from Martin, me and his mom) and a cel phone (from her mom) which was then added to her electronic/digital gadget collection with already included a pretty skookum digital camera. Add to that a healthy set of grandparents supplemented by my family who spoil her like the lone step-grandchild she is and she’s really generally pretty kitted out for stuff. If that in and of itself wasn’t enough, one of Martin’s clients opened a new clothing store for tweens this Fall and Miss P was treated some hardcore shopping on credit that Martin had built up over the year. This meant that as the holiday season rolled around we were at a bit of a loss for what to get her until she suggested that we redecorate her room for her as her gift.  And so we set to work.

To be totally honest, Martin set to work. I helped with the prep, the planning, the picking up of paint (Benjamin Moore’s Lavender Lipstick in their Eco-Paint), the ordering and pick up of the wall graphics from Surface Collective, but then Martin put in the bulk of the elbow grease. The logistics broke down like this: on Monday, December 17th Miss P went back to her mom’s place meaning we could begin the work (the final product was a surprise, she only knew she was getting her room done). The work then needed to be done for the following Sunday, December 23rd. Meanwhile there was the usual working to do all week and of course additional Christmas prep, sewing and baking to be done. It was, to say the least not going to be a slow and considered project. Martin had the Monday off work and managed to get 80% of the painting done that day after breaking down her old room, which then resided in our livingroom (with the Christmas tree) for the rest of the week. Tuesday evening we painted trim. Wednesday evening Martin modified her bed to add two drawers below it to replace the dresser that was in her room (she doesn’t keep much in the way of clothes in the room and we were trying to maximize space). Thursday and Friday, we rested. Saturday night the walls were dry enough to apply the decals. As you can see in the photo Martin painted big white circles around the room which continues his circle theme, and has the effect of making the room seem much bigger. We decided to put the decals in the circles and to cut them on the edges to make it look like they were being windblown "through" the circles around the room. The end product is — I must say — pretty awesome. And Miss P has declared it a roaring success, in the squealing, jumping, happy way of eleven year olds.

The whole project felt a bit like living a home reno show. With a limited budget and very limited time we were able to pretty much transform the room from a hodge podge of discarded furniture stuffed into a room into a very cool, modern pre-teen girl’s room that feels more spacious than our wee house’s actual square footage generally affords. You can see more photos here all of which were taken by Miss P herself.

  table & bench 
  Originally uploaded by emira.

We’re three strips of quarter round away from finishing the kitchen now. (With the exception of our Ikea drawer fronts which still have not arrived, but that’s out of my hands and so off my to-do list). Last week, while I ran out of any sort of steam on this project and instead focused on making use of the kitchen and just ignoring the unpainted bits here and there, Martin managed to grab some more resolve from somewhere down deep to start and finish a built-in bench and table combo.

Part of our inspiration, however round-about, for our kitchen reno was the combined kitchens of Martin’s cousins in Denmark. Between their city flat and their gorgeous country cabin they had managed to create very efficient kitchens with little in the way of fuss or clutter. Those Danes I tell ya, they’re the masters of simple efficiency. Their city flat had a very small kitchen but one that was very usable for four adults to prepare meals in and share a meal or drink in. Part of what made the room work as a very simple built in table/bench system that created a layout that had the table tucked in a corner and required no room on one side for chairs to move in and out (due to the bench set up). While our kitchen had room for our 50s table, it kind of  "just fit" and when we added the leaf into it for guests it meant we could seat 4 adult comfortably and squeeze in 6 for a dinner party with little breathing room. Given that we don’t have a diningroom and won’t be getting one without some major renos, this has left us a bit cramped for entertaining which is a shame as I love to have folks over for dinner. And so, we began to draw up plans for a built in system of our own.

And, Martin, fabulous and fearless woodworker that he is, made it all happen in short order. The best part? The table, which is attached the wall on one side and uses some bent plywood legs we picked up at Ikea on the other end, can still accommodate a leaf to expand it for dinner guests. Without the leaf it’s 4.5" long (longer than our old table) and being tucked against the wall it leaves much more room for moving through the kitchen. With the leaf (which still needs to be milled) it will be 6 ft long allowing for hopefully a dinner party of 7. Only one more than we could seat before, but hopefully it will be a bit more comfortable and less elbow to elbow to wall as it were. The way that Martin came up with the leaf system is simple genius, and will write up a little "how-to" with his help this week for those who are interested in doing this as well. It’s deceptively simple.

Oh, and did I say the leaf was the best part? It is definitely a contender. But for a kitchen gadget whore like myself the storage in the bench could win out. The bench will be holding things like my extra stock pots, juicer and appliances that don’t get used every day allowing me to use the regular kitchen drawers and shelving for more everyday items. With all this storage I’m able to keep the counter tops quite clutter free which pleases me to no end.

We’ve yet to have much time to sit at this table to enjoy it together, but we’re now close enough to being done that I think some kind of small celebration is in order to Christen the new kitchen.

  my personal kitchen party 
  Originally uploaded by emira.

The trouble with working full time (and sometimes a bit more than full time) and renovating is that it leaves no time for blogging. Perhaps I just need to get my priorities straight.

So, where is our reno at?

We’re over the hump.

I’d say that we got over that hump on Friday in fact as Friday evening we had running water hooked up to our new sink, gas running safely through our stove, and 2/3 of our cupboards installed and waiting, empty, to be filled. Martin spent that night out having dinner with a friend and I came home after what felt like the world’s longest week and threw myself a little party.

On the party menu: one individual bottle of champagne (one should really always keep one of these chilled in the fridge as I swear you will never know just when you’ll need it), a roasted veggie cheeseless pizza (have you had one of these from Amy’s Kitchen? I’m not one who can usually abide frozen pizza but that stuff is good) and the DVD player set to Marie Antoinette. A recipe for goodness I tell you. I then proceeded to have a domestic geek-out evening of champions putting stuff away in my lovely nice new deep kitchen drawers. I will admit to you that there was dancing, singing along aloud (something I only ever do alone) and much arranging and rearranging of cupboard contents. It felt like Christmas.

There is still plenty to do kitchen wise, but we’re mostly down to the details now and I’ve had the distinct joy of cooking every night since Sunday. I’ll catch y’all up on the rest over the next few days but for now, if you’re curious, there are photos.

  My hero and his blow dryer 
  Originally uploaded by emira.

I had heard a lot of things about Armstrong Vinyl tiles before we installed them. Most everyone I spoke to who knew anything about them warned me that, while they are a pretty easy type of flooring to install (true) they are easily screwed up if your not careful. Specifically one must be very sure that you’ve got the tiles in the right side up before you put the glue down. If you don’t look carefully I can see how you can mistake the top from the bottom of the tile and in the chaos of renos it would indeed be very easy to get a few in upside down. "But don’t worry," folks told me, "they’re pretty easy to pull up." With this bit of advice we were pretty sure we’d avoid any need to pull up tiles by simply paying very close attention. I say we, but really here I mean Martin as the floors were resolutely on his task list during this reno. And he did a great job. A fantastic job. He got all covered in glue and his back hurt each night when he was done, but really he did a fantastic job and didn’t screw up anywhere. Sure there a few less than perfect joins back there behind the stove, but with a one tonne stove who is ever going to know but the cat, and really he doesn’t mind.

I’ll admit, we were pretty smug with the floor installation. No tiles in upside down and exactly two spare red tiles thanks to our ingenious idea to put in black/neutral ones under where the cupboards would be installed. Could things get any better? Turns out yes.

Sunday evening we were all set to go pick Miss P up from a friends place, where she had wisely been escaping the reno all afternoon. With 20 minutes left before we had to leave we decided to move in a few pieces of the Ikea cabinet boxes I had put together earlier in the day to see how things were shaping up. These were cabinet pieces to go over the black floor tiles against the one main wall. We popped on the legs and carefully moved them into the room, watching to make sure we didn’t scratch the floor. And what do you know but the black showed out from under the cabinet. AWESOME!

You see, while the measurement of a 25" deep base cabinet is totally correct, meaning that the calculation of two 12" square floor tiles below would be adequately covered by the cabinets is totally correct, if you plan on only ever looking at your kitchen from an aerial view. If you plan on actually approaching your kitchen from a normal human perspective you will see a 2" line of black tiles poking out from under the recess where the toe kicks are below the cabinets. OF COURSE!

With roughly 2 minutes left until we had to go get Miss P and meet a dinner reservation for what was now our gabillionth meal out, I calmly told Martin that I was really "not ok and was probably going to start to cry." He tried courageously to convince me that really it looked fine, but I was having none of it. I knew deep down in my overly priviledged home owning soul that I could not live happily with a 2" strip of black poking out from under one of my walls of cupboards.

I should step back for a moment to try to explain to you just how nasty our old floors were. They were, as we discovered original flooring, dating them at roughly 65 years of age. For 65 years in a high traffic area of a pretty small house they looked awesome. For floors that you wanted to actually appear to look clean after you got down on your hands and knees to scrub them they looked like crap. And, while I may not be the cleaning whiz my mother is, I do like a clean floor. Especially in places like the kitchen, and these floors were just never coming clean. And so it was that one of the primary motivators in our kitchen reno (for me anyway) was really replacing the floor. Perhaps now you’ll see why I wasn’t so keen on the black line. Perhaps you don’t, but trust me at 5:58pm on Sunday evening I felt deeply defeated.

It’s amazing how someone you’re so close to can sometimes surprise you. Martin often describes his handy skills as "a bit guerrilla" and he’s right. He is an absolute visionary who gets determined to execute something and he will often sacrifice detail if it gets in the way of the speedy execution of his vision. Because he builds so many beautiful things for us and our home, I can’t really complain about this. Lord knows I’m not going to teach myself to build a dresser or bedframe and if he cuts a few corners in the process, who am I to complain? However, knowing Martin’s disposition I assumed he wasn’t really going to work with me on my resolute rejection of the black floor peep show. I was wrong.

He asked me to go downstairs and get the blowdryer he uses for tool/handyman type things (for those of you who don’t know Martin is a hairdresser so we have no shortage of awesome blowdryers in the house) and he set about heating and peeling up a tile. Fortunately, all the stories about mislaid tiles meant I had heard in fairly intimate detail what the best approach to removing tiles would be. We called Miss P’s friend to say were were running a few minutes late and before dinner we pulled out one tile. I had hope.

Now, however, you will recall we had exactly 2 12"x12" tiles left. We needed to pull up and replace 9 tiles due to the 3" overlap problem. When we got home from dinner Martin decided to try scoring the remaining black tiles 3" from the edge and heating and removing only that portion. It worked. He then very carefully cut our two remaining tiles into 4 3" strips and with a bit of shaving and jigsaw puzzling we managed to re-lay all 8 of those pieces. The ninth piece ended up as a hodge podge of tile scraps but that will be almost totally covered by the cupboards. And, while I would love for it to be "more perfect" each time I get down on my hands and knees to really scrub that floor I will remember the way that Martin made absolutely no fuss about getting down there with his blow dryer and fixing that floor for me. For I know that he would indeed have been totally fine with it as it was.

  the stove, the wrench 
  Originally uploaded by emira.

So where were we? Oh yes, smack dab in the middle of a classic case of renovation hubris. It was Saturday, I had paint on the walls and I could see things unfolding before me beautifully. And, boy was I wrong.

Saturday’s set back was not a minor one. I did spend the day painting and prepping walls and then when Martin came home from work we set about moving the appliances back in place. After replacing the stove back to its original position, and rehooking up the gas line from the oven to the main line, we discovered a small gas leak. Though of course it didn’t really happen like that. It happened more like this:

We replaced the line using teflon tape and this crazy gas line sealing gunk on each joint just as the friendly fella at Rona showed me the other night. There was mild panic as we had to make a few attempts at lighting the pilot light, but then all seemed fine. We had a gas flame on our stove and I tried to tell myself that was great.Still, I was nervous that something had been dislodged during the whole unattaching process, as it required a lot of twisting and wrenching to take apart in the first place, and those are some old pipes and bolts we’ve got there. So, to assuage my nerves I ran the gas monitor a few times, the levels were slightly higher than usual, but I reasoned this was from the whole taking a while to light the pilot light scenario. Still, I wasn’t satisfied, so I put some soapy water on the joints to check for the bubbles that a leak would indicate. We went about putting furniture back in its proper spots and cleaning up when Miss P came in the room and announced that the kitchen stunk. Both Martin and I turned around. "Really? Stinks like what?" he asked. "Farts," she replied. We both ran over to the gas line. We couldn’t see any bubbles but there was a gas smell that was for sure and a sinister hissing was coming from the pipe. As we tried to assess where the leak was coming from (and hoping to all the gods in the pantheon that it was above the shut off valve) Miss P stood behind us repeating: "Do we need to evacuate the building?" like some kind of over eager safety parrot. For the record, this is not a helpful question to be asked aloud as your internal monologue is desperately trying to assess the relative danger of your gas line situation. Two minutes, and 15 "Do we need to evacuate.." later there was a large soap bubble coming off the back of the pipe. We shut off the gas at the valve (for fortunately it was coming from above the shut off) and resigned ourselves to another few days of no coffee in the mornings. I’m very proud of myself for not crying at that point.

We weren’t going to pay emergency rates for someone to come fix it on Sunday so we called Monday morning and a lovely fellow came to the house while Martin was here, but he didn’t have the right pieces, so he had to reschedule for today.

As I type this that same lovely gas line fellow is here putting a new coded valve on our pipe and reattaching our stove. If all goes well (I can not possibly tell you how superstitious I am about this), we will be able to have coffee at home tomorrow morning and possibly even a home cooked meal this evening (though we’ll still be washing our dishes in the bathtub). If that is the case, then I will be the happiest shopper in the food coop this evening, even if I am exhausted.

Sunday brought its own set of problems and delays and they have continued since. I promise to share the delight here as it involves Martin coming to my heroic rescue, but for now I must pay the gas man.

PS: The gas fellow just left and we seem to be in the clear. I feel like cheering from the rooftops. I also feel like a nap. I think I’ll settle for a trip to the grocery store to fortify me for tonights attempt at plumbing. Wish us luck!

  On goes the paint 
  Originally uploaded by emira.

After our Thursday night of less than happy couple time renovations, last night was perhaps a welcome split shift renovation evening. I come home from work and sanded all the drywall patches, cleaned up from that (man I hate drywall dust) and managed to get a coat of paint on the wall behind the stove/fridge before heading out to dinner. I then spent the rest of the evening in fabulous company eating a beautiful home cooked meal. I was in heaven.

Martin, who worked later than me, then came in for the second shift and managed to lay the very last square of floor tile as I rolled in the door from my dinner. Perfect timing.

The floor looks fantastic. Where you can see the bits of it not covered by drop clothes, paint cans, drywall mud and boxes of tools that is. But really, it looks awesome. It’s a nice deep red colour, strong but not overwhelming and it looks nice against the wood floors it adjoins in the office and livingroom.

The walls are a slightly different story. They’re a lot greener than blue — I wanted a greenish blue — and that lead me to a minor freakout as I envisioned a Christmas green and red kitchen. We also have particularly bad luck with greens in this house so I was a bit panicked as the first few strokes went on the wall. I decided to complete a full wall and then paint a few other spots around the room so I could wake up this morning and judge the colour in different lights. I’m most relieved to say that I actually really like it. And once we put in our white cupboards with wood counters I think it will look really lovely. Airy and warm and in kind of retro tones that fit the era of the house.

Now I’ve managed to paint one half of the kitchen this morning and am just waiting for it to dry so I can do a second coat. The other half needs further wall repair and sanding (from ripping out cupboards) and is a bit hard to get to with the one tonne stove and fridge pushed against the walls. If all goes well by tonight we’ll have that wall prepped for paint tomorrow and the rest of the kitchen painted (save trim which I haven’t really started to think about yet to be honest). Miss P will be arriving this afternoon as well and I’m hoping that tomorrow I can talk her into becoming an Ikea cabinet building helper. The dream of all dreams would be if we could also get the countertop and therefore the kitchen sink installed this weekend, but I’m not getting too set on that. At this point I’d happily wash dishes in the tub if we could make a cup of coffee and heat up a bowl of soup in the kitchen.