Time to let a good friend go.

You may remember Big Red, our drywall lift, from earlier days of our reno. This drywall lift saw us through 2 bathrooms, 2 bedrooms, livingroom, diningroom and kitchen of drywalling. It is very handy for drywalling ceilings and is pretty useful for the higher up part of walls too. Since we are now basically done drywall (except for our basement where the ceiling height means Big Red is overkill) we've decided it is time to say goodbye to our old friend. If you think you might be in the market for a drywall lift for $100 OBO please send us an email: 416fixerupper@gmail.com .

Antiquing in Hamilton

Today we took a trip in the rain out to Hamilton to do some antiquing. We hit up Antique Avenue thanks to a tip from Rambling Renovators.

We saw some neat things and ended up bringing home this little red bird figurine.



Many other interesting things to see in the store:

Kidney pills anyone?

We're still here!

It's been a long few months with little in the way of blogging. Tight deadlines at work for the more blogg-ey member of our duo meant some stagnation on the blog front. Luckily progress on the house has not stalled out. Since we last talked house we've done the following project:

• tiled the entry way
• did some long overdue redecorating of the living room
• finished the guest bedroom closet

As the dust gradually settles we'll try to do a post on each of these items.

Up next we're planning to tackle the master bedroom closet and maybe some more tinkering on the basement. This is all just until the snow melts and we can get back to the backyard which needs a new fence and parking pad.

New favorite restaurant

Last night we treated our parents to a night out Toronto-style at Lucien. This has to be by far the best food we've had in Toronto so far. After an amazing dinner at Alinea in Chicago last year I thought I'd never find a restaurant that could even come close to measuring up, but Lucien is probably the closest we've come (we tried Colborne Lane last year but made the mistake of going on Valentine's day so maybe it deserves another shot...).

At Lucien 2 of us had 4 courses and 2 of us had 3 courses (a la carte) and a bottle of wine and the total with tip was still comfortably below the $500 mark and the food was extremely tasty.

Stand out dishes were:

• French onion soup with duck confit - the flavors in this were so good.
• Beef bourguignon - this was absolutely amazing. It wasn't the stew but all the ingredients of beef bourguignon with 3 cuts of beef (including the best tenderloin I've ever eaten!) and some vegetables and sauces.
• Venison gnocchi - this was a kind of simple dish (venison sausage with gnocchi) but the flavours were still really good (I think the member of our party who ordered this ended up wishing he had the beef);
• Ontario red deer - I only got a taste of the deer on this one but it was tender/good. It was served with some cranberry which seemed really nice.
• lemon meringue and chocolate beetroot brownie were probably the 2 best desserts (of what the table ordered). I had a hard time finding the beetroot in the brownie dish but it was tasty none-the-less.

The Money Pit

We've been pretty quiet the past few months. More about that later. While we've been quiet we've officially finished everything above-grade in the house. We are now also at a point where we can watch this movie without having a meltdown:


Our house was way to close to this state when we bought it...

Happy Sunday!

I was reading the Toronto Star online edition this morning and this story caught my attention. This fellow east Toronto couple found a snake in their house for the second time. They found a snake a month ago while renovating a bathroom but it slithered away. After a month they recovered the initial visitor and within 2 weeks they found another one (apparently a quite resilient one that survived the wash cycle of their washing machine). The Star article does a good job of highlighting all the freaky facts of how far/long snakes can live if they escape from their owners. Given the close proximity of housing in Toronto it's a little disturbing ;o).

One interesting thing the news story links to is the husband's YouTube page where they've done a really nice job of documenting the hunt for snake #1. I hope they got some footage of this new visitor and continue to document their snake saga. It's kind of fascinating.

Dear lazy-Web...

I'm just wondering if anyone else out there is watching House and drooling over the loft House and Wilson share. I've been searching for any info on it online but haven't found anything. Anyone find anything? I'm getting desperate... I may have to resort to screen captures... *ugh*

Weekend baking

We had another weekend with no progress on the house. Instead we made cupcakes and butter scotch sticky buns


Since last week we also had our energy audit. It went pretty well and it looks like we should get all our rebates back. Our neighbours that were just getting the rebate for the furnace didn't get bothered much, but since we are trying to get rebates for a window, insulation, furnace and hot water heater we got asked for receipts. We have most of them... somewhere... We've tried to be methodical, but inevitably in all the shuffling of boxes around the receipts stash has gotten buried.

Next week we're hoping to start on our next project... the stair way. The last part of the house with "old lady pink". We're looking forward to the final "de-pinking" of the house.

Work hard play hard

The long weekend was a great break for us. No renovations got done and much fun was had.

First off we hosted a Mad Men themed cocktail party. We really like to entertain so it was fun to finally have a party in our house. At the request of one of our friends we made it a formal affair so everyone dressed nice and had some tasty snacks and cocktails.


Then for Valentine's day we were off to Colborne Lane . It was a good meal with some molecular gastronomy tricks to boot. After Alinea in Chicago it wasn't totally mind-blowing but still pretty good for TDot.

Today was back to work :P and tomorrow is the energy audit... then we'll see what we get up to next.