...from "Robin's Egg Blue" to "Muskoka Green"...

When we bought our house it was a Robin's Egg Blue colour. I didn't dislike the colour but the more issues that we discovered about the house the more evident it became that the entire outside of the house would have to be ripped off and re-sided....to my surprise I went to the cottage for a weekend with my parents and Bill ripped the whole side and back off in one long weekend...by himself!!! Over the next couple of months the rest of the demolition was completed and it came time to choose a siding colour. We ended up going with "Muskoka Green" and although it took me what felt like forever to choose a colour we are really happy with how it looks. 

behind the old blue siding was a layer of stucco....ick!

Deck and  front yard landscaping to come this summer hopefully.

"Love begins at home, and it is not how much we do... 

but how much love we put in that action."

- Mother Teresa

Our next project has been the front of the house. Unfortunately, the awning and front porch had to come off in order to finish the siding, rotten wood in the living room / dining room walls and foundation issue. We were initially planning on putting an awning back on but the house actually looks a lot bigger without it and we are going to finish a nice front deck area instead. So, this is the before:

...and this is where we are at right now:

It doesn't look like much right now but I am starting to have a vision for what it will look like in the end. I want to put a large decorative piece (possibly a metal leafy idea) in the middle of the two windows and we were initially thinking of a dark navy blue siding (kind of nautical) but we are concerned about it fading so now we are back to the beige family. Can't wait to show the finished product!

"A man's home is his wife's castle" ~ Alexander Chase

Gardens are a form of autobiography. ~Sydney Eddison, Horticulture magazine, August/September 1993

My love of gardening started back in highschool where my first job was at Rice Road Greenhouses in Fonthill. Ever since I have been fascinated by plants and flowers, especially perennials. One of my favorite gardens to plan out is a perennial garden, I love to research bloom times and lay out a garden area so that there is colour all spring, summer AND fall. We have been blessed with a larger property so I have lots of space to experiment! Last summer I tackled a side garden that was filled with goat weed (a very annoying weed that grows so fast it is hard to keep up with and that you probably can never get rid of 100%) and cleaned up our front garden. We don't spend a lot of time in  our front yard so I made that garden fairly low-maintenance with sedum, hostas and some cedar bushes. In the side garden I planted a variety of hydrangea, phlox, shasta daises, clematis and trumpet vine. Everything bloomed pretty well last year but I am excited to see what happens in the coming seasons as the plants have matured! I also made a little path with a wishing well over our cistern to "prett-i-fy" the concrete hole that we need for our water but was kind of an eyesore in the garden. Here are some pictures of what I have done so far...

I think this year I will put more colour in this pot, the verbena kind of strangled the poor pink geraniums last summer:



 This one was a gift from my mother-in-law for my birthday, a peegee hydrangea (the same flower that I carried in my wedding bouquet!):

This summer I am going to tackle some pond gardening!

 My green thumb came only as a result of the mistakes I made while learning to see things from the plant's point of view.  ~H. Fred Dale

Two Rooms Done!

After the bathroom was finished we tackled our bedroom...and slept in our living room for a few months! We actually ended up turning two rooms into one to make a huge master bedroom. While the bedroom presented a few less obstacles than the bathroom we still managed to find a lot of rotten wood, a severely off level floor and a wall where a window used to be with NO insulation! To top it off Bill also had to re-do a lot of the drywall work because when we ripped the side of the house off in the summer all of the screws popped and the corners cracked. All in all we are pretty proud of this room, especially Bill's trim work. He makes all of our door/window casings and baseboards himself (so glad I married such a handy guy!). One of the cool choices that we made in this room was to do bamboo flooring. It looks really awesome and its great because it is a renewable resource so we are also making an environmental contribution. 

Here are a couple of before pictures (the first one from before we moved in):

These are a few of the after pictures:

~ It takes hands to build a house, only hearts can build a home ~

...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!