Sick pooch

Well as luck would have it, 2 days before our drive to Toronto our dog, Trinity is feeling under the weather. We called our vet and he seemed to think it is most likely a muscle sprain of some sort. She's got some pain killers and appears to be on the road to recovery.

Just in case something else goes wrong we're looking for vet recommendations in Toronto. If you know of a good vet please post their contact info!

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Shower Enclosure

Since we are going to want to take showers right away once we move into the new place we were looking at many different places where we might be able to pick up a shower enclosure. We found the perfect one here from vintagetub.com. It has a nice faucet along with a telephone shower attachment for when our little dog needs a bath, and it is a tub wall mount(like our existing one at right).

Fortunately we asked the good people at ourcastle how their order from vintage tubs went and they reminded us why UPS sucks for shipping to Canada(see comments). So we went hunting all over the internet for a shower enclosure that included a telephone attachment for less than 1000$. This search proved to very difficult, all the sites that listed a similar item linked back to vintagetub.com. I had almost given up finding one and just forking over the 300$ in 'brokerage fees' to UPS and then I found this on ebay!























It seems like it will be perfect, it even comes with supply lines which will eventually save us over 200$.

After purchasing this on ebay I received a reply from the folks at vintagetub from a question I had sent them earlier and it turns out that they will ship using Fed-Ex or USPS upon request after all. I replied and suggested that they make this clearer on their website and informed them of the hazards of shipping to Canada with UPS.

Onward and eastward...

Well the condo is officially sold now. Packing up and having the movers take everything away has made the past week very hectic!

I guess Trinity was concerned we might leave her behind so she decided to climb into a suitcase to make sure she wouldn't be forgotten.

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Kitchen Envy

For those who frequent Houseblogs.net this is likely old news (2 days is like forever on the Internet, right?)...

In the feature story about the "Look What I Did" contest, the folks at Houseblogs.net referenced an *amazing* kitchen by the folks at House Obsession. We weren't originally very inspired by white kitchens, but rather we were resigned to white cabinets for budget/resale considerations. This kitchen has definitely sparked our interest in white kitchens and ignited the black/light colored granite debate.

For anyone else out there obsessing over this kitchen, we happened upon a blog entry on More Ways to Waste Time where the details of this kitchen transformation are revealed.

Our Favorite DIY Home Improvement

This is a post about our favorite DIY project for the Houseblogs.net ``Look What I Did!" contest.

So far, our favorite DIY project is the bathroom renovation we did in our condo. When we moved into our condo the full bathroom was pretty depressing. It was painted a dark purple, had a plastic tub surround, and a previous owner had decided to paint the tub to stretch its lifespan a bit.





After about a year of watching the paint chip off the tub, we figured it was time to redo the bathroom.

We didn't really intend for this project to be DIY. We had saved up some cash and were ready to pay someone to do the work. Granted this was 2006 in Calgary. The city was going real estate/renovation crazy and contractors were few and far between. After a few dismal quotes we decided to go it on our own. We did the math and figured we could mess it up about 3 times before it would cost as much as paying someone to do it anyways.

After many trips to the home improvement store, and long hours pouring over plumbing and tiling how-to books (as well as the Internet) we decided we were ready. Since this was the only full bathroom in our condo we had set a tight timeline on the project (~3 days).

Amazingly all the research and planning paid off. We didn't mess up (*yay*) and we managed to get the bulk of the project done just in time for a Monday morning bath before work.

This project gave us confidence in our home improvement skills and made us realize that home improvement isn't as scary as we had thought. Below is a video documenting our process.





After:




**This post was written for Houseblogs.net as part of a sweepstakes sponsored by True Value.**

Some more neighborhood research.

It's been a while since we blogged. We're busy packing up and getting ready for the big move. While procrastinating on packing we've managed to find some more online resources for our neighborhood.

Danforth East Community Association
Danforth Life
An article about what life used to be like on the Danforth

History Lesson

Being from a part of the country where most neighborhoods are fairly new, we've been quite interested in the history of our neighborhood in Toronto. In our searching we found some good resources at the City of Toronto Archives. Below are some pictures we found of houses from the 1960s and a stretch of Danforth from 1925. It's interesting how much things have changed over the years.