Forced renovations

We noticed last night that the toilet all of sudden wasn’t flushing.  As we only have the one toilet in our wee house this is not acceptable.  Mr. B got up nice and early this morning and off to Home Depot he went to get an auger. $100.00, boom.  Not even 8:00 a.m. and we’re at a hundred bucks.  Gonna be a good day.

And he augered and he augered and no joy.  Toilet still wouldn’t flush.  Grrrrr.  Okay, next step, remove the toilet and give it a full internal.  Teehee.

Once the patient was resting comfortably in the bathtub, Mr. B could begin the scoping procedure.

Are you surprised that he has a tool for that?  I’m not.  It’s a tiny camera with a light on the end of a flexy arm.  He uses it at work to check for blockages in machines without having to uninstall them.  He’s a pretty smart guy.  Hmmmm, what can be the problem…what can be the.  Got it.

Yep, there it is.  That mass on the left side of the screen?  That is one of Stella’s racquetballs.  It would appear that at some point last night when one of us flushed the toilet and turned to the sink she hit the bowl for a drink and had to drop her ball first.

See, she loves to watch the water go round and round and then have a drink.  Simple pleasures.  Unfortunately, this simple pleasure was a bit expensive today.  We could not get the ball out of the toilet no matter what we tried.  It was up around the bend and was not willing to come out.

We could not save this patient.  A new toilet was our only option.  Back to Home Depot and another $100.00.  Pretty expensive morning so far, eh?

There she is.  All shiny and new.  An added bonus is that bowl, tank, and lid are all one colour.  This is a big step up for our funny little house.  The previous set up was a yellow bowl, bone tank, and white lid.

The man who used to own our house was beyond frugal and tended to salvage things and cobble them together.  Not too sure what to do with the old toilet now.  I’m thinking a nice red neck planter in the yard.  Class, we haz it!

Most toasty

Summer seems to have found our little corner of the world with a vengeance.  It took awhile to get here but it’s roasty toasty now.  I’m having to water the garden pretty much every day.  Mind you, I’m harvesting something pretty much every day too.  Tomorrow, baby yellow zucchinis will be on my grill.  Nom, nom, nom.  Last night?  Oh, it was gorgeous!  It was a root crop extravaganza!

7 small to medium beets

3 small turnips

1/2 teaspoon ginger powder

1/2 teaspoon cumin

juice of 1/2 a lemon

some splooshings of olive oil

sea salt

Put all this in a nice aluminum foil packet (make sure you put a couple holes in it, you want roasted, not steamed here), and bung on a medium grill for about 35 mins.  I also did baked potatoes at the same time. Oh, and there were mushroom slices with butter (also with a couple holes in the foil) for on top of the following flank steak.  What flank steak you say?  This flank steak.

The meat player in the game was a lovely flank steak.  See, told you there was flank steak.  Just salt and pepper for seasoning.  Grill 5 mins, spin (not turn!  Spin for pretty grill marks), grill a further 5 mins.  Turn, grill 5 mins and spin again.  You want to lovely grill marks.  Let the steak rest at least a couple of minutes and then slice across the grain in 1/8 th inch slices.

It was lovely.  Hmmm?  What’s that?  Pictures?  I did think about it.  After we had devoured it and were sitting back on the couch and burping.    The beets were this variety from West Coast Seeds.  They are growing so well and really are quite lovely.  I’ll try to get a proper picture next time I cook them.  They are tasty enough to eat raw, straight out of the garden.  Like candy.  Sort of like Abbie and I did one day last week.  She had red juice all down her beard and looked like a little vampire.

Husband and I also fluked out and found some really nice and really cheap glass mosaic tile for our kitchen backsplash today.  I had really wanted glass but it was over $35.00/sq foot to order.  NOT!  This, $7.19/sq foot:

It looks a bit like an acid trip in the picture.  The sunlight was playing with it.  It sure is pretty though.  All kinds of greens/browns/golds/beiges.  Really, it’s the 70′s in glass.

New roof? We haz it…

almost.

What we did with our weekend

Let’s just do this as a photo essay, shall we?

This is what we started with

Rip it out!

Really former owner of my house? Were you on crack?

A little rotting drain pipe anyone?

At least someone liked the old cabinets

Still going

Gee, I wonder when we can turn the water back on?

What? I'm on a break

OMG! Countertops!

Supervisor Stella

Gonna be a sink in here soon!

Oh, and there it is.

Unfortunately, the water was shut off for awhile. Miles of dirty dishes!

Miles

A tap!

With running water

Man, that was a lot of work.

It’s all in and we love it.  Of course everything took 4 times longer than it should have because we had to keep fixing previous reno nightmares of the form owners.  Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to run 2 or three loads of dishes and laundry.  I’m so happy to have the water back on!

Look at it this way, 20% of the working week is now over!

Yeah, and then we all sang Loverboy!

Oops, showing my age again.  Teehee.

And now, let me show the most perfect apple in the world.  Picked not 20 minutes ago from a tree in the backyard:

Then Mr. B got at it:

We’re also drowning in tomatoes.  Every other day I’m picking a bowl like this:

We only have two plants but wow, are ever producing.  They are so amazingly tasty too.  WAY better than anything from the grocery store.

Mr. B also got back to working on the kitchen.  After living with the HUMONGOUS five foot by six foot island for 6 weeks we decided it was just way too big.  We downgraded from Beentsalia to more of a peninsula.  I’m calling it Bonavista Peninsula.

Now it’s only 39.5 inches wide and will finish out being about 72 inches long.  much more logical.  We can now pass things to each other instead of having to walk around because we can’t reach over it!  LOL.  Now that I look at it in a picture form instead of just being in the room it looks a bit yuppy loft to me.  Hmmmmm.  Yaletown comes to Whalley!  Snort.  Sorry, those of you not living here won’t get that one.

Not much else going on really.  Supposed to be a thunder and lightening storm tonight/tomorrow that I’m sort of looking forward to.  I have a few more Homeric hymns to read over and absorb.  Then a bit o’ knitting.  Added bonus to it being Monday?  It’s House night!  Love me some Hugh Laurie.  I prefer him as Percy in the Black Adder series, but this is fun too.   Night all.

Even on the darkest day…

our kitchen is going to all nice and bright.  Mom, you should look away now, you’re going to hate this:

Behr – Wildflower Honey – B50-6.  Oh, it’s gonna be bright I tells ya!  This is just a one quart can to slap around on the wall and make sure we like it before we buy a couple of gallons.  So far, I’m pretty smitten with it.

Oh Canada!

My home and native land!

Guess what today is!  Yep, it’s Canada Day.  Love it!  Makes me all proud stuff.  I’ll be humming the anthem on and off all day today. 

Got some stuff done recently.  Went to a Picknit in the park last night.  Totally forgot to get many photos but here is a nice one of some socks in various stages of doneness:

Mr. B also ran the electrical and we installed the oven:

Mr. B has to made a special sized drawer front for that bottom bit.  We were a little bit creative in our spacing of appliances and Ikea was not convinced that creative was a good idea.

Whoo hoo!  You know what that means don’t you?  We had bacon this morning for the first time in weeks!  Nom nom nom.  It was a Canada Day miracle I tell you.

You’ll also notice a plethora of handles on the cupboards now.  So much easier to open than using bits of blue tape!

Okay, I’m off.  Got some WIP’s that need working on and the momma and the poppa are coming over for a visit.  I should prolly vacuum.

World wide knit in public day?

Um, yeah, every day on transit is knit in public day.  Today, I just could not face taking transit for more than an hour each way to hit the sort of local WWKIP event.  I know all my knitting peeps (gosh, I’m so hip) were all there.   Me?  I was here:

Spinning this;

I also had some company:

Then later, there was more company:

Then I was overwhelmed with company:

Turns out, I’m wicked popular with the four legged/hairy set!  I think it’s  because my opposable thumbs can open their bags of treats.

Oh yeah, we also built the final kitchen island the other day:

We ended up rotating that far right cabinet and made it into a drawer cabinet instead of a shelf cabinet.  Now we have a place near the fridge for pop…and chips…and pretzels…and cookies…damn, I just gave away the snack drawer.  Didn’t I?

Island?  Um no, that’s a continent.  I’m going to call it Australia.  Wait, that’s not been used, hasn’t it?  Hmmmm, okay, how about Beentsylvania?  Right, I like it.    Today we built some drawers and stuff and now it looks like this:

That’s my favourite spot to sit and read, Internet, snack, everything really.  I’ve spent more time in the kitchen in the last week than I have in the last year.  It’s just so much nicer than it was before and I’m deeply, madly, passionately in love with this little corner of it.

There are shelves and doors for the left hand open space and an end cover piece for that light coloured bit on the right.  The entire thing is something like 6 feet by 5.5 feet.  We’re prolly going to cut it down to about 5.5 by 5.5 feet.  That seems somewhat more logical for a household of two people!  That way we can seat 6 comfortably.  ‘Cause we’re always having dinner parties for 6.  ANYWAY…

We absolutely over planned and over built this entire kitchen.  Story of our lives.  You should see when I make chili.  I could feed a football team.

Okay, I’m going back outside to spin some more.  I have 8 ozs of that fibre and it is calling me and begging to be made into yarn so I can knit it up for something lovely.

What? Ikea has come out with a laptop?

No, it’s just the cleverly disguised packaging of a new kitchen step stool. 

This weekend’s update is all about biting off more than is good for you!

This post is long, it’s really more for me and as proof that the hubby and I are actually this stupid, ’cause there is no way we’re going to believe the stuff we did in a year or two.

I also wanted to remind you to get your entry in the late spring blog contest by midnight pacific time, June 3.  Just post up a comment with your favourite book(s) of all time and why and you’re in the draw to win some pretty sock yarn.  I’m too tired to link to picis, have a peek in the archives, it was a couple of days ago.  Now, on to the fun of the past few days.

We needed to get rid of this chunk of garbage, which unfortunately was actually holding up the ceiling:

So we started with that:

Found a weird plug:

Built an interim wall to keep the roof & ceiling from falling on us:

Remove nasty old framing;

Build a big fat beam out of three huge twelve foot long 2 x 6′s, construction adhesive, and a gazillion screws (say hello Stella):

Installed said post into it’s new position.  *NOTE*  there are no pictures of this process, suffice it to say there was a fair bit of swearing, a couple near misses when I almost dropped my end, and a new bruise or two.

Here’s a little tip, two people is not enough for a task of this scope.  We’re idiots and both of us are in a fair bit of discomfort now from forcing our rather aged bodies to be much stronger and more flexible than they are.    You’ve been warned and hopefully we’ve learned this valuable lesson.

Anyway, once all that was done we just had to unpack the larger of the two tops for the island and put it in place on one of the old cabinets so we could see if we liked the plan so far:

The island will actually be a fair bit bigger than this, about 25 more inches towards the chairs, to line up with the blue line on the floor.  This has opened a whole new Pandora’s box of issues but I’m too tired to think about them right now.  Happy Sunday all.  I need a shower and something to eat.