The Potato Patch

We've suspected for a while that we had squirrels in the attic. We'd hear running, or scrabbling. But we always said "oh, maybe they're just on the roof". Poor deluded souls, we were. Last week, I was sitting at work, and the phone rang. Kenneth says, "There's a squirrel in the house and the cats are chasing it!". Apparently, the squirrel had managed to come inside the actual living area of the house, we think through a hole under the bathtub. It tried to attack him before it escaped back into the bathtub hole and disappeared.

So last weekend, we went on a mission - "Mission Squirrel Elimination". I crawled around in the attic looking for possible entry points.

Here's a very attractive picture of me doing so:


I found the squirrel's toilet.


Gross. You'd think he'd have the common decency to go outside for that.

I found 3 possible entry points, but the way the roof is, it gets ultra narrow towards the edges, which of course were where the entry points were. It's impossible to reach the edges with the holes from inside the attic. Outside, it's still very snowy and icy, so again, we can't reach them. We're talking a 4 inch thick layer of ice. We have to live with the squirrel until spring. We did block up the hole under the bathtub so he can't come into the actual living area of the house any more.

And in other news, the basement started leaking, thanks to the snowmelt we had the other day. Great.

I still love this house, but boy, is it ever a lot of trouble.

Labels: house

It's been 4 weeks since we moved in, and we still aren't totally settled. But we're getting closer.

Today there are strange men in my basement installing a new furnace for us. The old furnace was really old, and really inefficient, so we're upgrading it. Here's the old one:



It's hanging out in the front yard, waiting to be taken away. Thank goodness the cost of a new furnace includes taking away the old one.

The furnace men told us it would take a couple of hours to install the new furnace, and they've been here for almost 5 hours so far. I think they must have run into some unexpected problems. I just hope it all turns out okay!! My feet are cold.

And now I will share some photos of our lovely (heh!) new bathroom.



Note the lovely puke-yellow fixtures. When we moved in, the vanity was really filthy, but now that it's clean, it looks a little better. Still, not something we want to live with for the next 5 years. Plus, last weekend, I discovered that the bathtub was leaking into the basement ceiling, which is not something we can really allow to go on. We taped up the leak with some "Magic Tape" - that might not be its real name, but it's designed for that sort of thing, anyways. It's not leaking now, but some half-assed tape isn't exactly a long-term solution. So now we need to start shopping for bathroom renovations. Ugh! I mean, it'll be great to have that bathroom renovated. The tile floor is loose and everything is yellow. But I don't look forward to interviewing the contractors, and deciding on all the new stuff to put in, and having it actually renovated. Nope, not at all.

Labels: house

The move date approaches ever nearer. I'm afraid the blog hasn't been very interesting lately, as I've been rather preoccupied with the whole moving thing.

The floor is nearly finished. The hardwood part seems to be completely done - they just need to do the tiling in the foyer and put the baseboards on. They've got 2 full days to do it before we move in on Sunday. I'm extremely paranoid that we or the movers will manage to scratch the brand new floor when we move in - hopefully I will be proven wrong! I got some good tips on avoiding scratches so I'm trying to be optimistic.

I promise once we've moved and unpacked, I'll start taking some pictures again. Actually, I think I'll take some with my cellphone just for fun (please excuse the poor picture quality).

I have been knitting in the meantime, but haven't been photographing or posting about it. I joined the Monthly Dishcloths KAL group, and knitted the "early October" dishcloth. Amusingly, it turned out to be a pattern of a cat, which is identical (or near enough) to the cloth my secret pal sent me in the Summer Fling swap. Now my only two hand-knitted cloths are matching. I think of hers as a facecloth, though, because it's so soft and nice. Mine was knitted out of crappy Michael's cotton (Bernat Handicrafter) which isn't so soft, so I think of it as a dishcloth.


I'm also still working away at my fleet of shopping bags. I now have five (or I thought I had 5, till I tried to photograph them, and found only 4). They evolve a little bit each time I make a new one. I think it's almost down to a science now. For my next one, I'm going to try using lace-weight cotton, to see if I can create a strong, large shopping bag that will nonetheless be able to fit easily into my purse and extracted when required. In theory I think it should work. The handles may be uncomfortable, though. In this pic they're arrange top-to-bottom in order of making. The bi-coloured one is my first attempt, and the one on the bottom right is my latest. The pattern calls for making an I-cord shoulder strap, but I wanted bags for grocery shopping, so I modified it to I-cord handles on the first two attempts. It was annoying to do, and looked kinda ugly, so on my latest attempts I've been casting off a few stitches (10-12, not sure exactly, I just cast off till it fits my hand), and then casting them back on during the next row. That's much easier, and I think it makes a nicer looking handle, too.


My cat seems to like them, anyways. (And here you also get a good view of the unassembled boxes I have yet to fill.)


And my never-ending Branching Rib pullover is still in process. I'm now about 6 inches into the second sleeve, so the end is in sight. I'd like to finish it by mid-November, so that it gets finished within a year of starting it. That would be good.

Labels: dishcloth, fleet, house, knitting

For the next week and a half, anyways. We got the keys to the new place today! Very exciting. The floor guy is supposed to be bringing the flooring over tonight so it can acclimatize to the house.

I have to admit, I'm having a little bit of fear that we won't like it there. That our stuff won't fit into the house the way we expect it to. That the floor we're getting installed will be ugly. You name it, I fear it. And to add to the fear, we closed the deal on Friday the 13th.

We had a little excitement with the closing, because part of the conditions of our offer was that the old people would remove a bunch of broken-down old appliances from the basement. Our real estate agent went to check yesterday, and they were gone - along with the dryer we'd been expecting them to leave! And the washer, which apparently we didn't include in the contract, and our agent assures us was a broken-down old thing we wouldn't want anyways. So they're paying us the price for a bottom-of-the-line dryer, and we have to go out and pick out new appliances. On the upside, it will be great to have new appliances, but on the downside, we're kinda busy with all this packing and stuff - and now we have to go appliance shopping too?

Luckily our agent is giving us $1500 to spend on appliances, so we should be able to easily pick up a washer/dryer for that.

Labels: house

As of Friday, our house is officially sold. While this is great news (and believe me, it is!), it leads to a whole new set of stresses. We're now closing on our new house on October 13, which is less than two weeks away. Our real estate agent is away on a cruise this week. I'm trying to arrange for a mortgage, movers, insurance, new floor installation, etc, etc, and all of it needs to be done ASAP. Not to mention we need to pack.

On the upside, we don't need to move out of our old house till Oct 25 (that's the closing date). We're tentatively planning a move date of Oct 22. The in-between time when we own both houses is to give the floor guy time to do his magic, and also to give us a little buffer on moving.

Last time we moved, we hired Two Small Men with Big Hearts. We liked the company name - they just *sound* trustworthy, don't they? Well. We had them booked to arrive at 3pm, if I remember correctly. By 9pm they still hadn't arrived and we'd made several calls to the office, and had done lots of freaking out. At about 9:15pm (I should note here that this was the last day of our lease in the apartment) they arrived at our door. We were so relieved. They then told us that since the elevator was no longer on service (the super stops work at 7pm and won't put the elevator on service after that), they couldn't move us. We told them that we would hold the elevator doors and make sure everything went smoothly. They said "We just need to go check with our driver", and left. After waiting about 10 minutes for them to come back from "checking with their driver" I went downstairs to look for them. Gone. Vanished. No more.

We ended up the next morning frantically calling rental truck places, rented a van for a half day, and moved ourselves. Money saving? Yup. Stress reducing? Not at all.

So my only experience with professional movers hasn't exactly been stellar. But, we have lots of furniture, including a king bed that needs to come down a fairly steep/cramped staircase, so we're going to try it again. Hopefully it'll work out better this time. I can tell you right now who we *won't* be using!

The title of this post refers to how I feel right now. I wish I could just crawl into a cave and hide there till after the move is done. I'm a massive bundle of stress. Don't expect many blog posts this month!

Labels: house

Well, still trying to sell the house. Nobody wants my lovely house! So we spent the past 3 days painting the basement to brighten it up a bit. We had previously painted it dark blue, to optimize the movie-viewing experience. But apparently people were complaining it was "too dark" so we painted it beige. Tuesday night was shopping and taping edges. The paint store people scoffed at us when we wondered if we'd need two rolls of tape ("I've painted 6 rooms and I still have tape left!" said the one girl.). So we bought one roll of tape, and ran out.

Wednesday night we primed. I'd done some investigation on the internet about whether priming was necessary or not. The general consensus was that it was, because we were going from a dark colour to a light colour. I have very bad memories of right after we moved into our current house. The previous owners had painted what is now our office, but for them was their daughter's room, Pepto-Bismol pink. I have nothing against Pepto-Bismol, but I don't think it makes for a very appealing room colour. We decided to paint it pale yellow. After 3 coats it was STILL looking patchy. We ended up having to buy a wallpaper border and install it at the top of the room because we could not get the top edges to look at all decent. So this time, we primed.

Thursday I took the afternoon off work, and we painted. The primer *really* helped. We did one coat and then went around and did a few touch-ups, and it looks great. I highly recommend priming.

I'd post before and after pictures, but we didn't take any.

We've also dropped the price a bit, and our agent is putting an ad in the Toronto Star, which has huge circulation, so hopefully that will help.

In other news, both Kenneth and I have gotten the same cold at exactly the same time. It's kind of weird. So rather than spending our weekend hiking, which was the original plan, we're thinking matinee movies (because there are open houses both Saturday and Sunday afternoons) and general vegging out.

Labels: house

I haven't posted in ages, because I've been too busy stressing out and cleaning my house non-stop.

We bought a new house! Up top, in my flickr photostream, you can see pictures of it. It's much closer to work than our current house - instead of a half hour drive, it's a half hour walk. OK, so the commute time will still be more or less the same (although, in the evenings, it generally takes me at least 40-45 minutes to drive home). I'll be getting automatic exercise daily. And I really think it will help me to feel better. I've been having lots of chronic muscle pain lately, which I think is aggravated by the fact that my life consists of: drive to work, sit at a desk all day, drive home, sit on a couch and watch TV, sleep. Too much sitting! I'm hoping adding in an hour walk per day will help loosen me up and rid me of some of this annoying pain.

The tradeoff for moving closer to work is that instead of having a modern 2-storey house built in 1997, we're buying a bungalow that was built in the 50's, and it's costing more. The new house (the bungalow) will need a bit of work, but I really like it, and it's in a great location with a big yard. We need to do the following things almost immediately:

• Have the basement waterproofed. There are signs of minor moisture damage in the basement and we want to stop that trend before it goes any further.
• Get a new furnace. The current furnace is 35 years old, according to the home inspector, and he says that they have a normal lifespan of 30 years.
• Have the attic insulated more, and install more venting. I really think this is a priority as it will save us a bunch on heating this winter.
• Buy a washing machine. It doesn't have one.

Things we'd like to do, but can wait:

• Refinish or replace the hardwood flooring on the main floor. It's pretty scratched up. I don't mind it so much, but Kenneth is adamant that he wants it fixed. Ideally we'd do this before we move in, while the house is still empty. It would be a bitch to have to move all the furniture into the basement or something so they could re-do the floors. It covers the living/dining, hallway, and all 3 bedrooms. I'd like to do bamboo. Kenneth would like a dark colour. Maybe we can compromise on a dark coloured bamboo.
• Remodel the bathroom on the main floor. It has 70's style dark yellow fixtures, and an ugly dark yellow tile floor.
• Remove the wallpaper and paint the living/dining/hallway.
• Buy a new fridge. The existing one is a little old and a little small.
• Buy a new dishwasher. The existing one is a little old. But we'll see how it works before making any decisions in that department.
• Buy new window coverings. The existing ones are pretty old and ugly.
• Buy new light fixtures. We've got some *seriously* ugly light fixtures, dude.
• Buy a bunch of topsoil and roto-till the back yard to get rid of the weeds.

There may be more things I'm not thinking of but those are the main ones. So it's going to be a lot of work, but I think it will be worth it in the end. And I'll get to walk to work! We'll also be saving a bunch of money in terms of day-to-day living. I'll get to terminate my $100/mo parking contract at work. We'll sell one of the cars, which means that's one less car to insure and maintain and gas up. Kenneth is thinking of taking the bus to school instead of the car, so if he does that, we could even insure the car as "casual" instead of "commuter" which would save a bit of money. I'm also thinking of terminating my gym membership because we have lots of weights at home, and why should I log all my gym gear to the gym to work out when I can do it at home? Right now, my motivation is because the commute is a lot shorter if I drive in first thing to go to the gym. But if I'm walking, the commute will be the same either way. I could just work out at home, shower, and then walk to work. Oh, and we will probably be moving Oct 27, or thereabouts. That's our official closing date for now.

That's all I have to say about the new house for now. Then we come to the old house. I need to sell it! I do NOT want to be in a position where I have to beg my dad to co-sign for a mortgage with me because I haven't sold my old house at the time I get the mortgage for the new house! He already told me he'll do that if I need him to, but come on. I'm 34 years old. I don't want my dad co-signing anything for me.

Labels: house

Skadeglädje is a Swedish word which means "joy from the hardship of others".

Our next door neighbour, ever since we moved in, has always had a much nicer lawn than us. His lawn is always lush and green, weed-free, and mowed to a perfect length. He's out there every day during the summer watering it. Having read up on lawn care when we got our house, I always said he was over-watering - the wisdom is that you should water once a week, an inch of water at a time. If you water more often, it makes the lawn dependent on the water and weakens it. However, his lawn always looked far better than ours even though I was following the conventional wisdom and he was not.

Well, the worm has turned. This is a picture of our front lawn - the neighbour's half is on the left and our half is on the right. Who's got a nicer lawn now? *evil laugh* (I know come mid-summer, his lawn will look better again - I have to enjoy this moment of triumph while it lasts!)

Labels: house