...the journey to our bathroom...

When we first bought our house it had two showers and no tub, something I couldn't live with! The upstairs bathroom ended up being our first renovation project (planned out while we were on our honeymoon and started the day we got home!). Bill knows how to do everything so he completed this project himself, with some minor painting mishaps contributed by yours truly! This particular renovation has set the bar for the rest of our projects and began a trend of finding the many many things wrong with our first home. We ended up having to rip down ALL of the drywall, replacing ALL of the (rotten) wall studs and ripping out the ENTIRE floor (including the sub floor). At one point you could actually see from the upstairs bathroom right down into the downstairs bathroom! However, all of these issues pale in comparison to the ceiling caving in one lovely afternoon (while Bill was working in there might I add). This was the only point during the renovation where I completely lost it. I had to walk outside, after learning that Bill was fine and braving the dust/insulation/drywall to turn off a work light that was rapidly beginning to heat up under the mass of insulation and starting a fire, and sit on the front lawn to shed a few tears over what had become a complete and utter disaster! We later recovered, after a call to Bill's brother to help with the clean-up, and Bill ended up finishing what is now my favorite room of the house a couple of days before Christmas. I had my first bath in my first house on Christmas Eve! So, while we over-spent, over-stressed and had to take a major hiatus from starting our next project, it turned out amazing and I enjoy it every single day :)


This is what the bathroom looked like before:

We moved the wall out three feet into the living room and replaced absolutely everything, this is the finished product:

...and this is what Bill looked like throughout the project...

DIY

 Our house is a bit of a fixer upper, thank goodness Bill is great at electrical, plumbing, drywall...and the list goes on. We have had to come up with a few cost-effective DIY projects to make our house a home along the way.  So far we have tackled the bathroom and the bedroom. One particular project that I think turned out pretty well was our bedroom closet doors. The closet unit is actually one of those organizer ones from Ikea, and was a major buying feature for me :) The previous owners had put those laminate fake wood-looking sliding doors on the closet with one large mirror. When we finished renovating the bedroom I wanted to keep the Ikea closet but I hated the doors! Below is a before picture of half of the bedroom taken during one of the visits we made to the house while the previous owners still lived there:

...and here is the after! I bought wallpaper from Home Depot and papered over top of the laminate fake wood-looking doors and left the mirrored door as is. Overall, great idea and worked a lot better than I thought that it would!

My Little Lady

As many of my friends and family know I have lots of dog stories about my little puppy named Lady, so it is only fitting that my first blog post be about her.

We got her last Christmas (picked her up on December 23rd) and she has been entertaining us ever since! From her antics in our backyard pond to her love of cuddles and kisses, we have no idea what we would do without her. She turned 1 on November 4th this year, but you would never know that she wasn't still a little puppy. She is a ball of energy and she certainly keeps us on our toes! As an example, she sometimes goes to visit my parents and their dog (who just happens to be related to her by the same dog parents, but a few years of litters apart) on Fridays. One Friday last year she was hanging out with my Dad in the basement and then wandered upstairs, he followed a few moments later and found her in their kitchen sink! To this day we can't figure out how she got in there...what a nut!

She has some pretty unique facial expressions this is one of them...

She loves to sit on what I call the "roundy roundy" chair (one of those round Pier 1 Imports chairs) and look out the window at the squirrels, bunnies, birds, neighbours, Bill shovelling the driveway...you name it!

She also loves to swim! All summer she was in and out of our backyard pond, sometimes for hours at a time. What started as a casual dip in June/July eventually turned into the great frog hunt of 2010 in August/September.

Bill and I found this video on youtube one morning and it really reminds us of Lady.

... until my next blog about my dog, enjoy :) ...