Quelle Vacance?

I know that my french stinks, but that means "What Vacation?"... perhaps in franglais....
This week has been my first official 'vacation' of any extended time (one week) since Steph and I went to the Dominican a year and a half ago.
So what have I done with my vacation time? Work. And inhaled toxic fumes. No, I haven't started smoking. Although if you step into our garage you might think so. No... Steph and I have been painting. And lots of it. And we're not going to finish in time!
So far we've painted our Living Room:









And our office:










And our bedroom:










But our bedroom turned out a little too 'Purpley' for our liking. Oops!
Still we think its a big improvement - scroll down to our first pictures of the house and see if you agree!
A big THANK-YOU goes out to all our family members who came out to help us get started. Right now, I'd probably still be staring at the walls figuring out where to start if it weren't for you!

The Psychology of Lighting a Fire

The other day I watched as my brother-in-law proceeded to light a campfire. He bundled up the wood. He made sure he had a lighter. He made sure he had gasoline. He dumped gasoline on the firewood. He lit it on fire. Presto. Bonfire.
This process of lighting a fire intrigues me because it is so unlike the way that I prefer to light a fire. The way I like to start a fire, well, I think my brother-in-law would call 'anal' - as though he knows anything about Freudian Psychology.
And yet, it probably is.
I like to think that my way of lighting a fire is the more skilled. It requires more finesse. More woodsmanship.

I like to light a fire by splitting wood into small slivers, then stacking wood (teepee or log-house style) around the shavings, and then larger wood ontop of that, and yadda yadda yadda.

My way takes a lot more time.

His way is much shorter.

Both result in the same thing. So neither one can be said to be better. Unless you consider environmental issues of lighting up gasoline.

I don't know why I'm bothering to write a blog entry on lighting fires. But it just intrigued me that the way you light a fire can reveal something about the kind of person you are. Psychology's finest moment!

So what are you? The quick-and-easy pyro? Or the highly skilled woodsman?

Suddenly, I felt Old.

Okay, we just bought paint, which is a big deal, to make our new house (also a big deal) feel like our house, which is a big deal.

We saved a huge amount on the paint, which is a great deal.

And the amount we saved on paint could, potentially, be used to put a new floor in the living room to be rid of any lingering pet smell, which would be a big deal if we could get rid of it.

But I'm going to talk about a bigger deal. At least in my personal opinion.

You see...

Lately, I've been more conscious about my receding hair line. Kindof a big deal. It's not that I particularly care about my hair, but that I can never get a hair cut that looks good for more than a week or two before it starts to emphasize my receding hair line. At least... in my opinion.

So the other day, we were cleaning up our brand new house (yes the bushes in front are a trimmed down), and then we cleaned up the egg that was thrown at our kitchen window (welcome to Barrie, eh? here's an egg omelet - on the house...!)(thanks)

and then I walked around to the front of the house and my mother-in-law said

"Oh my! David! I've never really seen that before!"

(my curiosity was piqued)

"When you just walked around the house there, for a minute, you looked JUST LIKE YOUR DAD! I never really saw that before, but I honestly thought you looked just like your dad right there"

Oh... Well now I feel a little more conscious about my receding hair line. And I'm watching my belly again. Maybe I'll have to start working out.

Who Likes to Paint???? 'Cuz Do We Have the Job for You!!!

Alright, so now that you've seen the pictures you're probably thinking....WOW, do they ever need to paint. Well, maybe you're not thinking that, but it's still true. We weren't anticipating doing all this right away, but it turns out the guy left the place an absolute mess including puttying the walls and not repainting them. We figure the most inexpensive way to fix our current perdicament is to paint. We were really not looking forward to the bill that was going to be! Luckily we received a RONA flyer in the mail this weekend, advertising a buy one get one free event for paint. So at 6am this morning we started on our way to RONA to be there right when it opened, to hopefully avoid any line-ups. Well needless to say there were no line-ups, which was good for us because the lady took her time to help us and didn't complain at all about our large order. So we walked out 1.5 hours later with 24 cans of paint and only paid for 12.....a savings of $450!!! We were pretty excited, but now we have 24 cans of paint that have to get themselves onto the walls.....anyone interested in helping????? :)

PS. Does anyone know how to get rid of a dog smell? We've tried cleaning, carpet cleaning, fabreeze and oust and so far nothing has completely gotten rid of it.

Welcome to Barrie

And now for the big unveiling:

This is our new house. Can you see the potential? We think we can. That's why we bought it. But it came with an unkept lawn/bushes, and two trailer loads of garbage! (thanks to the former owners).

It was an interesting day. But we'll save the details for later... Right now, we'll just show you some of the "Before" pictures. Maybe in a few months we'll be updating with some "After" pictures.

Entrance

The Kitchen

The Living Room (see if you can zoom in for the tacky wallpaper)

The Master Bedroom (Martin - you're coming to Ontario soon, right? 'cause we need a painter!)

The Blue Bedroom (zoom in for the teddybears!)

The White Bedroom

Upstairs Bathroom

The Deck

Half of the Backyard (the other half features a Rabbit Pen)

The First Thing We Did (Clean Up the Place!)

Now you've been given the quick tour....if you want to see more (or the improvements, some of which will be quick in coming) then you'll have to come out and visit!

The Grass

Well... Steph and I are three days away from the closing day for our house. We've managed to get all our finances together (... surprisingly, with a little kaching left to spare in our bank account!). Now we're just worried about the condition that the former owners will leave it in.
We do get to do a final walk-through before we close (in case we need to hold back any kaching for repairs or disposal of trash on closing) but who really wants to go through all that?
We're hoping to be able to just walk in, do a little cleaning and settle.
But Steph did a 'drive-by' earlier this week and it seems that they haven't cut the grass. Possibly for weeks. Maybe months. Oy.
Is it fairly normal for people to leave a mess behind? Or is anyone still considerate enough to clean up before they leave?
We'll find out! ... on Monday

Our New House!! (Just Kidding)

The past two weeks, I've been 'enjoying' a 'visit' to a 'cottage' in 'Owen Sound'. I say 'enjoying' because we were there working - and didn't really have time to enjoy much of it. There was no t.v., not much food, the 9.8 horse power Mercury engine kept sputtering out and dying when we were in the middle of the lake, and not once did I get time to sleep in that hammock you see on the left side of the 'cottage'.

It wasn't much of a 'visit' as the complications of this deck forced us to be there for 2 weeks which is more of a temporary home than a visit. Actually, I think I was there for longer than I've been at Steph's parents (where we're staying until we can move into our new house).

This 'cottage' has a total of 7 separate sleeping areas, some of which have more than one bed. So you could probably fit our entire Geertsema clan into the 'cottage' fairly comfortably.

What you see is one of the largest decks I've ever built. It features Winchester Grey Trex deck boards with a hidden fastner system, ProBuilt Aluminum Railing (with tempered glass inserts), and a giant 8 person hot tub (8 feet by 11 feet). Total cost of materials - not including the hot tub - was somewhere around $16,000. If you use the rule of thumb (cost of materials X 2 = total cost of deck including labour) this deck costs around $32,000, except that my boss typically charges much more than the going rate... And this was not a typical deck.

The only thing that will keep the cost of this deck down is the fact that we were building it for my boss's boss. (I work for By Design Construction and we get ALL our work from Cedar Springs Landscaping)(the boss of Cedar Springs Landscaping owns this cottage and rents it out...)

I'm proud of this deck.

I'd show you more pictures, but uploading this picture took a full half hour on the ol' country internet connection.

The only thing I'm more proud of is the fact that every night but the first night, I beat my boss at foosball.