Guest bedroom closet

Now that all the living areas are done, we're taking time to do some much needed renovating of the bedroom closets. First up was the guest bedroom closet. This closet had crumbling plaster and lathe with holes from the re-wire (yes.. right after we moved in..). The plaster and lathe holes combined with the non-sealing attic access meant this closet was too dusty (and prone to random sprinklings of yucky cellulose insulation) to store anything other than packed boxes. We never took any pictures of this heinous closet so you'll just have to trust us that it was really gross.

We remedied the grossness by drywalling the closet and properly sealing the attic access.

Like most old things in our house the floor in the closet was gross, so we put down a new cork floor since we're out of the hardwood we used in the rest of the house (finally). I was pretty amazed at how nice cork is these days. We may have to look at it more seriously when we do our basement.
With the walls built, floor in and trim done we built an L shaped set of shelves and installed two levels of hanging on one side of the closet. Here it is in action. We unpacked three more boxes today (yes, 2.5 years later we are almost unpacked). We also moved most of the stuff from our main bedroom closet since that space is next on our hitlist. So this is a bit more than the closet will normally need to hold but it does it pretty well.

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.

Deck-ed out

Despite the silence progress has not completely stalled on our place. We got the bulk of the deck done very fast but one of us wanted to spend time getting the lattice work and finish details just right before the big reveal. The deck design was mostly inspired by the deck at 247 Reno . We're pretty happy with how it came out. The deck is 10'x~16' which seemed really big when we were planning it, but upon seeing it done I don't think we would have been happy having it much smaller. It does take up quite a bit of space in our yard but once the garage/shack is torn down next summer it should be an appropriate size relative to the yard.

Without further adieu glorious "after" pictures:

This is Trinity next to the outer corner of what was going to be our BBQ "shrine". It seemed weird to be standing peering into our neighbors' yard while BBQing though so we opted to move the BBQ closer to the house.

Trinity with the stairs to the yard.

Outside of the "BBQ Shrine". Next summer we will probably replant the tree in the barrel into the ground. My step-dad horticulturalist says it's an elm (quite common in Central Alberta our homeland)

A lot of attention went into the lattice work and cladding the pressure treated 4x4s because they didn't look as nice as the rest of the pressure treated wood. I'm really happy with how it came out even though I argued that doing this was madness when it was suggested.

What the BBQ Shrine is used for now. It's so nice to look out on this from the kitchen. It makes it feel like our backyard is some tropical place. Unfortunately we didn't finish the deck in time for tropical weather :P.

Stairs down to the garden. Yeah no rail. We live dangerously. Or rather we value prettyness over safety. Get over it, its 2'.

Backyard update

So after giving up on hiring out the siding we ended up doing it ourselves over labor day long weekend. Since then we've been super busy with building the deck and craziness at work. Here are some pictures of the progress. We'll write more later when things are a bit less hectic.





The beginning of the BBQ alcove: