Grocery store epiphany

My good friend Jamie traveled to the 'shwa this weekend for a visit. We hadn't seen each other since my wedding (almost 7 months ago) so a visit was long overdue.

Jamie and I met in residence at university. We met the first week of school in her first year (my second year), but didn't really start to be close friends until the night of my 20th birthday a couple of weeks after that.

The night of my birthday a big crew of people from our residence went to the bar that night to celebrate my birthday, and we all consumed way too many $6.50 triples (served in mini pitchers) and we danced up a storm. My then boyfriend decided he didn't dance (loser!) and decided to watch from the sidelines. I had gone out to dance that night, and figured his non-participation left me free to dance with whomever I chose, so dance I did - with the girls, with the guys, and on the speakers.

On the walk back to residence my boyfriend started an argument about me dancing with male friends, so I decided when we got back that I'd blow him off and send him home. I gave him his marching orders (he'd travelled to see me) and, being in a less than sober state I started hanging out with friends in the hallway, with him still there. I could piss the boyfriend off as he was leaving because I was still having fun, and I could hang out with friends. Jamie was down the hall, and getting help from another friend on a physics lab so I hung out with them.

Since that night we've been great friends, including midnight trips to the 24 hour grocery store, more nights out at the bar, sobering each other up with crackers, long drives home, and a ton of inside jokes only funny to the two of us. Our younger days were filled with tons of partying. We were always relatively responsible, but we always had fun. Even having lost touch for a while we've always been able to pick up where we left off.

This weekend was no exception. We hit the grocery store and wandered around aimlessly selecting items for dinner, picked out frozen drinks, and laughed the whole way through the store catching up. As we were going through the produce section, I decided to pick up a few lemons. With Dave and I getting ready to sell our current house, and a realtor coming over to appraise it, I kinda figured a nice big bowl of lemons would make a pretty centerpiece on our kitchen table.

After having hit every aisle of the giant grocery store, reminiscing the whole way, laughing and talking about our wilder and crazier days, we hit the checkout. As we were loading items onto the belt, we both paused for a second. Funny how the stuff we'd bought was the same sort of stuff we'd bought years before. Jamie joked that thing missing was the jello for making shots, but when we put the lemons on the belt that's when it hit us both. Irrefutable proof we were getting older.

In our younger days, a bag of 8 lemons would have been bought solely for the purpose of tequila shots. Now they were being bought as decorations to spruce up house that's for sale.


____________________________________________________________
The good thing about being older, though is that you have blenders to make fabulous drinks, and fresh rolls can be made faster when you've got a food processor. Getting older isn't all that bad, and memory lane sure is fun.

Not with a bang, but with a whimper

Sorry for the lack of posts lately - we've been swamped working every night after work, and on the days off we've had getting our house ready to sell. Given that our new house closes August 28, and we need to sell this house to buy the new house, we want everything to be in good shape before we list this one. Apart from that I haven't felt much like blogging of late.

So, to say it's been a busy week would be an understatement. We've made pretty much daily trips to home depot. I knew it was going to be a long week when Dave came downstairs and announced that he had "good news and bad news" a week ago.

The bad news was that the bathroom walls we had recently removed (hideous) wallpaper were covered with a thick vinyl wallcovering underneath the wallpaper we'd (now unwisely) taken down, and he had already picked some of the vinyl away, so now it all had to come down.

Here's the bathroom before we moved in, to give you a sense of what I mean. To the left of this picture is the tub, and you can see the sink/toilet there. That's it - another two feet for the tub and a wall!

The only good news was that our bathroom was now a couple of millimeters bigger.

The rest of that night I peeled vinyl wallpaper away while Dave was at job #2 , only to find crumbling lathe and plaster walls below them. The next few nights we bought sheetrock and drywall compound and have slowly mudded up and sanded them down. One last go at it and we should be able to paint. We left the remaining vinyl up and just mudded over it so it'd look smooth. We've picked out a nice fresh spring-ey green.

What else? Well, our basement, like lots of older houses had a bit of a moisture issue (aka it leaks in some spots) and any buyer would go running after hearing that (if only we'd known!), so we chipped away layers of paint and cement on the floor with wire brushes, and putty knives to scrub away loose paint, prep the floors and Dave and I put on patches of waterproofing cement so that the new buyers of our digs will not have to put up with what we have. For good measure we're also coating the floors and walls with a waterproofing white paint. Once that's done we'll buy some cheap-ass carpet to lay down and it'll be done. The worst third of the basement is done, so now we just have to reposition furniture and organize our crap and paint the walls, and get some new carpet down and it should be good to go.

The master bedroom has never had a closet door since we moved in, and we figured new buyers would be lots more interested in the house if there was one there, so we've cut one down to fit (and further sanded it when it was too big to fit), painted it, and now there's this gorgeous door on a freshly patched, sanded, and painted master bedroom (walls, ceiling, and trim, two coats!). It doesn't even look like it should be our house anymore! Definitely an improvement.

We've also moved our king sized bed into storage given that it gave us about 3 millimeters of walking room in the bedroom. The double bed that was in the spare room is considerably smaller, but we'll remake it as an office/workout room. Adjusting to sleeping in a double bed has been interesting... I woke up pinned to my left by Dave, at my feet by the two cats, and walls on my right and at my head. Good thin I'm not claustrophobic. I was practically eating the wall, which would be a bad thing because it's a safe bet that there's lead paint on these walls.

We also put a ton of extra things that have been cluttering up the basement there so that it would look more open and less junky.

My parents drove up to help us today as well - dad made all the windows sparkle (what a difference), and mum swept, cleaned floors, and made a fabulous lunch and did a ton of other things I'm sure we'll discover.

We're still dealing with a house that isn't quite ready to be listed just yet, but progress is being made and, fingers crossed, I think it should be ready before the end of next week. Woo hoo!

The bang and the whimper? After a few panicked calls to the mortgage people this week (why would I provide them with information if the person taking it don't pass it on to their underwriters? You'd think a whole other source of income and info about our down payment and changes of address (THREE TIMES I GAVE THEM MY NEW ADDRESS) would be something they'd pass along... apparently not so much) the deal on the new place officially closed today unless we notified them otherwise. And so, it's ours! YAY! I can't wait to be sipping tea on the second floor balcony reading all your blogs (well, at least for 30 seconds until my laptop battery dies) in my PJs. Next week we're hitting the decor centre to pick out the finishes and then we're just playing the waiting game to sell this place.

This is what our new house looks like right now. For the record I most certainly did not break the condition of going on the property while it was under construction without going with a representative of builder and I also didn't wind up with two soakers as a result of doing so.

Why I'm up at 6am on a Sunday

Maybe if I knew the sunrises were this pretty every morning I would get up every morning at 6am. This is just shot from our dining room window.


Monday to Friday I stretch out in bed as long as I possibly can until the last possible second when I absolutely must get up. Dave gets up as soon as the alarm goes off at 6:40, goes downstairs to do ironing or read the paper or has a shower, while I lounge around half asleep (or more than half) and wait until I absolutely MUST get out of bed. At that point (as late as 7:40) I frantically have to get ready for work, throw on a suit, iron a shirt half-assedly, eat breakfast, make a lunch and head out the door. It's a frantic pace but all worth it for those extra few minutes of sleep for me. It's not that I'm not a morning person, it's just sheer laziness, because I know that I could get up in the morning and go for a run (to reduce my case of comfy bum), but I don't.

When I was a kid, I was always the first one up in the house for Christmas, Easter, or really any holidays that involved candy. I was up and ready to open gifts usually hours before the arbitrary "you're not allowed up before" hour that my parents would arbitrarily set the night before (usually 8am). I'd wake up well before that time of course, and just lie in bed waiting as every number on the big red digital clock slowly ticked away, counting down the minutes (which seemed like years) until the time I was allowed to get up. I would even play games with myself and think about homework, or read, or see how long I could go without looking at the clock. I think on a few occasions I even tried counting sheep. Every second seemed like years before the magic hour came and I could run to every other bedroom (occasionally resorting to tactics like jumping on beds) to wake up my sister and parents and get their lazy, sleepy asses out of bed because it's Christmas! and Santa came! and we need to go open presents right.freaking.now. or my head would likely explode! (see the funny aside here in question 7 when my sister grew too cool to get up excitedly Christmas morning.)

This morning I had the same feeling, but it's just an ordinary Sunday morning. A few things have come into play, though that gave me that feeling.

Last week, you see, we saw a man with a tape measure about the kitchen we had planned for our house. After going through designing no fewer than 5 separate kitchens on the ever-frustrating ikea kitchen planner, we had a guy come over and measure our place. He got exact measurements, then looked at our plans, to see what he thought was best. I was especially concerned about the amount of space there would be to go through the doorway into our dining room. Just as I suspected there would be an 18 inch space to squeeze through, which, as kitchen designs go, would probably not be enough. But! This guy had a solution! You could seal off the doorway, and then move it to the other part of the kitchen! Perfect! Except that would be ridiculously expensive! And while it would make things a ton more workable, and would actually allow us to have a pretty freaking awesome kitchen, I kinda thought "hmm maybe not." We haven't even got a price about the cost of moving the doorway, but I'd guess it'll be pretty freaking expensive to do the work to fix up the walls, take out the tiled ceiling, and move the door way, remove the existing cabinets, and install new, pretty ones.

Our tiny "upgrade kitchen" project snowballed into a "reconfigure the kitchen design a sixth time, replace walls, insulate and drywall them, take out ceiling and tiles and existing fan, drywall, put in pot lights, move a door frame, move plumbing and electrical work across basement, re-do floors, remove old cabinets, paint, install cabinets and backsplash, write big, ginormously fat cheque, weep over beauty of new kitchen and sudden emptiness of savings account."

In the end, while the kitchen would be so awesome I'd scream with delight every time we walked in, after all that work, we'd still have a tiny two bedroom home. This has never been the house we were planning on having kids in and living for the next 20 years.

I'm SO happy with the improvements we've already made (electrical, removal of wallpaper in the hallway and replacing it with pretty paint, painting the living/dining room, some plumbing work in the basement) but you can dress up a basic house with the awesomest kitchen, and it's still a basic house.

We'd like the idea of having more than one bathroom, (and one that's bigger than your average closet). This house really is a wicked starter house, full of character with an awesome back yard (cedar lined! Most are more than 10 feet tall!), but we started thinking with all the expense a new kitchen would bring maybe it'd be better to change houses instead of kitchens.

Thus began a new, invigorated search on MLS for a house that would fit our plans to eventually expand our family beyond the cat/canine species.

And we found an awesome house- three bedrooms, finished basement, hardwood and tile throughout, good location, and it had A FREAKING INGROUND POOL. So, for a couple of days I obsessed about how wicked awesome that house would be, and, after driving by on Friday night, vowed to call the real estate agent Saturday so we could go for a walk through.

His company paged him, and he called me back about an hour later. The conversation between me and the listing agent, who I'll call Captain Surly went something like this:

Me: "Hi, I was wondering if my husband and I could see one of the homes you have listed on MLS sometime this weekend" (sounding sweetly as I can muster).

Captain Surly: No. Probably not. (as though I'd asked him if he could just be a dear and fly to the moon under his own power, because I'd left my purse there, and, while it only cost a dollar and had nothing of value in it, it would be ever so helpful if he could just scoot up there to retrieve it for me)

Me: (kinda puzzled). [Pause] Uh. Ok.

CS: What property was it you were looking at. (in the tone of "ok, I'll humour this poor dumb twit")

Me: [gives him the address]

Him: No, that place has an offer on it already.

me: (now turning to my favourite weapon, sarcasm) Ok then, and thanks so much for being so helpful. Goodbye.

So, with a seconds-long conversation with Captain Surly our hopes of summer pool parties involving many blender drinks and pool noodle fights quickly vanished. Big sigh.

We consoled ourselves with the loss by looking at approximately a gagillion other listings, and then decided to just go for a drive to see some of them, and see what we could find. On our way to one place we saw a sign for a new subdivision, and thought "meh, might as well check it out." We ended up spending yesterday touring about 5 or 6 new subdivisions and their model homes, and several other homes that were having open houses, including one where the agent had to follow our every step to say "isn't that a nice paint colour" and other inane and highly obvious things to us at every step. I think she thought if she stopped watching us for a nanosecond we'd escape like burglars with armloads of pictures of complete strangers, still in their frames.

At the end of the day we kept coming back to the same thing. We really, really, REALLY liked the first builder we went to see, and the model home was so nicely designed. It's steps from a conservation area, which would be awesome. In fact it was so awesome that we went back and toured through the model home one more time, and the sales centre this time with an eye to what lots it could be put on, and what finishes were extras and armed with a ton of questions.

The debate, though, continued. Do we buy a house now that will be our in-between house where we'll live until we can afford the "final" house, or do we just throw everything into it and live in a mostly-empty house for a couple of years and buy the one we think we could live in for the next 20 years?

We looked at lots again, and finishes, and decided that we probably should get the 4 bedroom house over the three, given that it wasn't much more expensive, and had lots more living space, including a dining room. It looks something like this and would be about a 30 meter walk to a conservation area.





So, the mortgage Gods have been notified and I'm hoping they send us the right number so that we can seal the deal and start thinking of listing our adorable starter home. As much as I may complain, I really love this house, especially after all the work we've put into it.

We've decided that we want to pick out all the finishes, so we know what will be an upgrade, and have a good idea of what it will cost us as a final price. We definitely know that the upgrade to a 4 piece bathroom with a soaker tub (it fits both of us, we climbed in and are not embarrassed to admit it), and maybe air conditioning or a dishwasher, or a tankless water heater. I'd also do some underground research about how happy other people are with this builder.

If we pull this off money will be tight for a couple of years. (ie no kids just yet, work a lot of weekend bail courts) but I tend to think it'll be awesome nonetheless. It would be ready for us to move in this summer, which would give us time to put the last loving touches on this house that we would want to make to get it ready for the next young couple just starting out and upgrading from an apartment.

So this morning at 6am I was bolt awake, wondering where we would put what furniture and thinking about all the , just as excited as I was Christmas Day as a kid.