Moving

The day is approaching and as everything else in a mother's life a curve ball is tossed your way - the C Monster is sick, fever of above 100, since last night.  As long as the grown ups can avoid getting sick we just might successfully get ourselves moved from one house to the other.

Geoff and I spend just a little over 3 months looking for our new home, we really felt we had outgrown our cute little 2 bedroom house however the past 10 years we had grown extremely attached to it and we knew it would take the right house in the right location to get us to move.

We did find the right house (we hope) and I think I may feel lost in it at the beginning as we are more then doubling our square footage.  Geoff will now have a great office on the 3rd floor and until our family grows I will also have a project/office room.  We will have a playroom until the C monster get a bit older and after that a formal dinning room.  My TV will no longer be in my living room; did I mention my TV will no longer be in my living room. 

The house is not perfect as is it does have some work and we are happy to take our time to renovate the parts we want to change; however it is beautiful the way it is and is 100% livable so we can take our time to the work.

I wanted to say a great shout out at our real estate agent  Josee Couture who has now helped us with the purchase of 2 homes and the sale of one.  It did not take her very long to understand exactly what we were looking for and find our new home. I say find because I had written off the home we bought before we saw it and told myself it was not the one for us; and since we were looking at one near by Josee said why don't we go see it anyways.  I fell in love with it the second I walked in.

Pictures of the new house after we take possession on Nov 30th.

Where have I been?

If anyone wonders where have I been the answer is in my back yard working.  I think it's been over 3 weeks now since I have been to the park or a "drop in" in the morning.  Don't get me wrong we still make it out in the afternoon or after supper to the park - C Monster is not totally being neglected for the back yard.  Also he really loves playing and "helping me" in the back yard.

So the day is finally here I get to plant grass today or tomorrow.  and then C Monster is banned from the back yard for 3-4 weeks to let the grass take.

You ask what did we do?

A Box for the Garden

The first thing was to build a small box around our vegetable garden.  We just built the the wall 2 4x4 high and only along one side and the bottom of the garden.  This was really just to help the dirt stay in garden - it also ended up helping us ensure our garden fence is installed straight.

I had a hard time deciding what to do about this wall and how to build it; see we live in an area that is of concern for termites.  I looked at stone and brick but the cost was much more then we wanted in invest; that left wood.  I started researching wood and pressure treated wood. Non-pressure treated wood is really not recommended for use in the ground especially if you know that termites like your area already.  There are a few exotic wood that you can use but most of them are from virgin rain forest half way across the world.  Knowing all that I started looking at pressure treated wood.  Their are 2 kinds of pressure treayed wood available on the market CCA and ACQ.  CCA is the traditional pressure treated wood that hear all the bad stories about the chemicals used and ACQ is a new alternative that does not contain any chemicals that the EPA considers of concern to the environment and humans.  I am not going to go any greater detail but here are 2 website with loads of information.

Does Pressure-Treated Wood Belong in Your Garden?

Chromated Copper Arsenate (CCA): ACQ - An Alternative to CCA

We were able to find ACQ wood both at Home Depot and Parliament Building Supplies.  I have to note that Home Depot had no clue what I was talking about and I have to call the mill that their wood is from directly to get the information; however Parliament Building Supplies informed me that they only carry ACQ wood.

Home for the Edemama

The next step was making a home for our Edemama, I decided this year to plant along the neighbors fence in addition to our vegetable garden.  This looks beautiful and also gives us a little more food.  I purchased a small border that matches our fence - this is to keep the #1 predator for our plants out - C Monster. This year I am also planning on doing companion garden; so in this patch we are also planting our lettuce and spinach.  

I also found these great spirals to use instead of wooden steaks.  I prefer medal instead of wood; as much as wood is sustainable because it will biodegrade I find I can only use my wood steaks for one or 2 years and after that they are dead.  These ones are sure to last many many years.  

Patio Stones for the BBQ & a Place to Rest

 

Next step was a home for the BBQ, for 5 years now the BBQ has just stood in dirt...  I spent time on Craig's List trying to score some patio slabs for free but was unsuccessful so we ended up buying some. We just got whatever was the cheapest per square foot - they are under the BBQ so who really cares what they look like. 

 

I also rejigged the stones we had placed last year at the foot of the tree.  I placed all our outdoor decorations up - the bench; some glass balls; lights; flower pots.

Finally we Have a Walk Way 

 

Last night I picked up some "fake" flagstone.  They are made from concrete.  We laided them down as stepping stones. You can't really see them well in this image because of the dirt but they are installed and we have a walk way once again.  We took out the old walk when we bought the house 8 years ago and since them well had noting. Last thing left is too plant the grass.

 

Looking forward to

Relaxing in the back yard while C Monsters plays in the grass.

Breakfast /No Nap / Exercise / Smells Like...

Breakfast

Geoff had been asking for scones the last few weeks - "so you know the good little wife I am " - I made scones this morning. It was the first time I tried this recipe and man was it a score; definitely a keeper; C Monster even ate a little bit of a scone - and he eats noting. I found the recipe on Epicurious - Cranberry-Orange Scones; as always I modified the ingredients as follow:

1 1/2 cups unbleached all purpose flour
1 1/2 whole wheat pastry flour
1/3 cup sugar
2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/2 tablespoon grated blood orange peel
3/4 cup (1 1/2 sticks) chilled unsalted butter, cut into 1/2-inch pieces
3/4 cup dried cranberries
1 blood orange peeled, seeded, sectioned and diced
1 cup whole milk
1 teaspoon apple cider vinegar

No Nap For You

The last past few weeks have been trying on us and C Monster at bedtime; he has been going down at around 9:30 - 10pm. Because he is going down so late he is also waking up extra late around 8 - 9 am just encouraging the vicious cycle. So we decided to take advantage of the great weather to drag him outside just after lunch and keep him fully distracted and awake. That does mean it has to be with Geoff and not me because if I am around he will want to nurse and well as any nursing mother knows it will knock him out. So far so good as I write this it's almost 4pm and C Monster and Geoff have been out all afternoon in the plus 10 degree pre-spring day. All I have to say is wish us luck for tonight; because man does mama ever need her evenings with papa back.

Exercise

Well the time has come; breastfeeding alone is no longer a suitable exercise regime. Breastfeeding will burn anywhere between 200 to 600 calories a day depending on how often your child nurses. I think C Monster is starting to cut back on his milk consumption and well my waist band is noticing it. To counteract this; today while the boys were out I dug out the basement and found; cleaned and set up our exercise machine. We are pretty fortunate almost 5 years ago now my father in law got us a "gym quality" elliptical trainer; however it has been sitting in the basement gathering dust for over 3 years. Well I did 5 minutes on it today and burned 60 calories. I want to start off easy 5 minutes a day for a week then slowly bring it up to 20 minutes a day. Here is hoping for my pants sake that I stick with it.

Smells Like Home

As I am writting this the aroma in my home is magnificent - all day their have been maple baked beans simmering in the oven...

I Am Not A Paper Cup

Pierrette bought this for me just before the kitchen renovation:



I've finally dug the coffee grinder out from one of the various boxes, and so I've started to use the cup, and I'm actually pretty fond of it. Besides the kitsch of a ceramic cup that looks like a paper one, it's a decent size, it feels good to the hand, it's got good thermal insulation (I can't even tell there's hot coffee in there once it's closed), which means the coffee stays fairly warm, and it doesn't seem to leak, which has been a problem for me with lots of plastic cups with rubber washers and screw threads that you'd think would prevent such a thing.

Anyway -- I'm pleased.

Looking Back: January 28th

Almost eight months ago now, I was trying to finish the flooring in the nursery before the little guy came along. Sadly, that was not to be. These are cleat nails, driven through flooring using a pneumatic nailer. You can see a chunk of a row of nails, ready to go into the nailer, as well as a single nailhead in the tongue of the bamboo I was laying, on top of the red rosin paper I was using as an underlayment.

Three more boxes of flooring ready to get laid down. One of these is still unopened, the other is half-used as I finish the floor upstairs. Pierrette already had the closet organized:
Finally, a bamboo plank where you can see the tongue clearly, sitting on top of the red rosin paper:

Christophe: Part III

So, once Christophe was born, they put him on Pierrette's chest, vernix and all. Although it's not uncommon to move right into initial breast-feeding at this point, that couldn't be done because Christophe couldn't reach -- his umbilical cord was shorter than is normal.

As an aside, umbilical cords are lumpier than I expected. I expected something pretty smooth, but it was twisty and lumpy. I wish I'd gotten a clearer picture, but you can google-search for it. So we waited for the cord to stop pulsing, then clamped the cord and I cut it.

Having the father 'cut the cord' is laden with symbology I wasn't entirely keen to explore, but there are so few parts of the delivery process I can really help with, so I caved to tradition. It was sinewy, like, well, sinews. Or rope, maybe. Gristly muscle. All that sort of thing.

After that, some of the vernix was rubbed in, and Pierrette got to hold Christophe while the placenta (which, to be honest, looks like the bag of organs that comes in a turkey, but bigger) was birthed. Watching my new son and wife interact was pretty emotional. We called a few people -- mostly relatives. After that, Christophe got to practice his first latch, he was weighed and measured, and we dressed him.

The midwives did their best to cram a few more bits of information in my head, but lack of sleep and being a little dazed drove most of it back out. By about 3:30, we were all set to leave, so we bundled up all our belongings, said our goodbyes, and went to the front desk to pick up Christophe's new baby health card, then from there to the car, and home.

Early in the morning, I left messages for Pierrette's parents and my parents, but also for Kim and Baz, who live close enough by, and have been through this experience, so it wasn't incredibly inconvenient (we hope) to ask them to pick up a few things for us -- in particular, the infant car seat, which I had left behind at Pierrette's request so as to not "jinx it," but which we obviously needed, and a few other things from the important to the inconsequential (cake!)

They arrived with those items when Pierrette was in active labour, so we didn't get to see them, although I could hear them from the tub-area where Pierrette was, including little Sebastian. When we returned home, we discovered that Kim and Lisa had set up the bedroom for us -- baby clothes, some diapers, quite possibly even some tidying, and baby's name all laid out for us. Considering we were dead tired at that point, it was a very welcome and pleasant surprise. For those of you following the last few posts, it was the setup I documented on our return and put in the first Christophe blog post to announce his name:

December Renovation Review

Back in December, we were still doing some tear-down. In the upstairs hallway, I'd peeled back the layers 'til we got to this nice plank subfloor. A little squeaky, but authentic. On top of it was really thin 1/4" ply with some strips around the edges, which I decided to replace:


Downstairs, we still had linoleum and carpet, which we'd just gotten clearance to replace without worrying about asbestos, which was great news:


Mostly, pulling the linoleum was as simple as sticking a prybar under it, hitting it with a mallet, and then prying:

Although you had to be careful not to lose a cat into the cold air return where they could go climb into the furnace ...
Once the linoleum was pried up, I cut it in strips and sealed it with duct tape to be trashed.


The carpet was broadloom rolled-goods, held down with a transition strip that was no match for a prybar:
Although the underpadding revealed some more of our friendly neighbourhood carpet-wormy things.
At the transition to the kitchen, I discovered that the kitchen may have a layer of christmas tiles, red and green. I'm not sure who thought that would be a good idea.
The subfloor was covered with ply, and the ply had some crusty layer of paint or possibly adhesive that I could easily scrape off with the prybar:

So, that's where we were in early December. Things have come a long way in the last month or two.

Finishing the Living Room

I've been working on the living room for the past few weekends. On February 9th, I was almost finished, but we had to go off to a shower (more on that later). When I sink a cleat flooring nail most, but not all of the way into a board, it's very difficult to remove without damaging the flooring, and they're very difficult to drive all the rest of the way in with a nail set, so I'd struggled with a few of these before Shawn suggested that I use a Dremel to cut off any exposed nail surface. That has worked fairly well, so I've been using that strategy ever since. It throws a lovely shower of sparks. I'm not sure what causes some of the sparks to fork in mid-air, but it does make for a good picture.

When you can use the pneumatic flooring nailer, it makes fairly quick work of installing flooring. I'm able to do about three courses in an hour in the living room, and I'm still pretty new at it. When I can't use the flooring nailer, it takes a lot more time. As you get close to the wall, you run out of room, and you need to use another strategy.

Initially, tried using Shawn's brad nailer for this, but it's just not accurate enough for my tastes, and at times the brad nails deflect. Perhaps with a very accurate sense of where the nailer will drop the nail (or a nailer that makes that more apparent) and fewer deflections (better nails? better nailer? not sure...), I'd go this route.

For my uses, though, I only have so much flooring to do, and I found it simpler to pre-drill, put in a spiral nail, and nail-set it. Takes a while, but it takes longer to brad-nail a strip of flooring and then take it out again when it gets screwed up.

Tiling (22-Jan)

So, although we'd been prepping for it for a few days before, on Tue 22-Jan-2008, we finished the tiles. I wasn't expecting it to be noisy, so I started them after work. Unfortunately, in order to set the tiles in place, they suggest that you whack them with a mallet, which is, perhaps not surprisingly, noisy.

So we checked with our neighbours to ensure that it was ok that we continue despite the noise, after the noise limit (7pm). It mostly went well, other than one tile that cracked as we tried to set it, and required a last minute replacement. We were also not able to get the first two tiles completely level, as I probably used a little too much mortar on those. It's also surprisingly difficult to lift a tile from mortar to put it down. It's suggested that you periodically lay a tile then lift it up to check coverage of the mortar, but that's difficult to do when it feels like it's being held down by super-powered suction cups.

Still, all things considered, I'm happy with the results. This is the tiles laid, in mortar, no grout, with tile spacers.

Here's a closeup of a tile spacer in position between four of our tiles:

And finally, my loving wife, with mortar on her knees, threatening to step on the tiles before they're set.

This post is a little late, but I've been busy doing the work instead of posting about it.

A Weekend of Renovation

I'll be renovating this weekend. Not that that's much different than any other weekend, but Pierrette is aiming to spend the weekend at my Tara's (my sister), so that I can focus on renovation and painting without any VOCs or other such toxicities affecting her.

That means I should be able to get more done than usual, assuming I don't tire myself out too quickly. Fingers crossed. I'm hoping to finish most of the mudding (drywall compound) and sanding, and paint the bathroom door, but ... we'll see how it goes.