An Update

Hello! It's been a while since I've posted anything, but we're finally back to a somewhat normal life and schedule. My husband has returned to work, and while we're not quite living in the house yet, we're hopefully only a few weeks away.
Our time spent working on the house was pretty great - we haven't spent that much time together since we travelled through Europe 12 years ago (and no, we haven't filed for divorce!).
I mentioned in an earlier post that we were pretty much freezing our butts while working there, but on April 12, it was positively balmy. We had a work party with some friends who came to help install soffits, and had our first barbecue of the season. One week later (April 19), we arrived to this scene:

It was breathtakingly beautiful, so of course we had to take time off from wiring to have a snowball fight. What a crazy winter it's been.

You may be wondering if I've gone off my rocker and painted the house mustard and black. As lovely as the combination is, the yellow is actually rain screen mesh that we've had to install on the gable ends of the house where the overhangs aren't adequate to keep the siding dry. There has been a huge "leaky condo" crisis in BC over the past 10-15 years (my mom and step-father both had to shell out big money to have their apartment buildings completely redone), because condos were being built with complete disregard for our drizzly climate, so the BC building code has been changed to make rain screen mandatory on most new buildings. The mesh creates a space behind the siding so that air can get behind it and dry any water that may have gotten through. It's an added material and labour cost, but much cheaper than having to redo the whole exterior 10 years from now.

Here you can see the Hardie shingles that we decided to go with. It has been installed on some of the house, but there's still a lot more to do. We've had help with this from a few of the guys on our contractor's crew, as the bank wants us to have everything done before they'll give us a mortgage with a decent rate. So we've had to choose between doing things ourselves and paying more in interest, and hiring someone to help us so we can save on interest. Either way, this is costing us more than we'd ever hoped!

This is my husband giddily wiring the very last fixture in the house. It took us way longer to wire the house than we thought it would, but we saved ourselves approximately $18,000 by doing it ourselves.

This is the stage we're at now - the house is insulated and awaiting drywall. A neighbor who also happens to be a contractor (and an organic farmer - but that's another post!) mentioned one day that it can sometimes be almost as cheap to hire someone to install the insulation as it is to do it yourself, since they get the materials for so much less. We did some calculating, and after our contractor sweet-talked his insulators, we ended up with a deal that we just couldn't pass up, and our house was insulated in two days (something that would have taken us weeks, I'm sure!). Even without a heat source, the house feels downright snug!

Our raven friends have been keeping a close eye on our progress, as have many other kinds of birds. We have dined with eagles swooping playfully overhead, watched red-headed woodpeckers excavating logs for a meal, and you can't be outside for 10 minutes without a hummingbird buzzing past your head.

Spending 6 weeks on the property has given us plenty of time to get to know the area and its inhabitants (human as well as animal), and we are smitten. I have never met friendlier people, and I can't wait to be a member of this community. I already know more of my neighbors than I do after 12 years of living in the city!

This process has not been without its problems, however. As I mentioned earlier, our budget has been blown completely, in spite of our best efforts. Fortunately, interest rates are low right now, and the basement that I fought so hard against in the beginning will in all likelihood become a welcome source of income, as we are going to put in a suite to help pay down the mortgage.

Thankfully, we've been blessed with a good builder, which was one of our biggest concerns about building. Unfortunately the pre-fab company we were dealing with has turned out to be a bit of a dud. If we had to do it all over again, we would hire this particular contractor to stick-frame the house rather than do pre-fab, as this method of construction has saved us neither time nor money (quite the opposite, actually). The upside is, if we hadn't used them we never would have met our builder, and besides doing a bang-up job on our house, he and his crew have become good friends to us as well.

And that's about it. Next on my list: putting up a deer fence up so I can get the garden started!

Garden Firsts

The smallest hint of a garden has begun popping up around the house, as the bulbs I planted a month or so ago have recently started to bloom.

These varieties will naturalize and spread, and should eventually blanket the hillside with blooms.

It's not much, but it's a start!

Let there be light!

We did it!! We managed to wire two complete circuits and get them both working!

That's a happy man you see before you - I hate to think what his expression would have been like if nothing had happened when he flicked that switch!

We've been freezing our buns off for the past few days, as we seem to be caught in a late winter cold snap. Snow fell on us both yesterday and today, but by the early this evening the sun was out and everything looked amazing.

Perhaps a circuit for the baseboard heaters should be next on the agenda?

Days 1 and 2

We got started on the house wrap on Saturday, but we quickly became too short for the job...

...the rest is on hold until we get either taller ladders or scaffolding.

I wired my very first electrical outlet today!

Only 200 or so left to go...

And so it begins...

First off, thanks for your nice comments about my little dresser project. I'm sorry that I haven't been responding to each of you individually as much as I'd like, and I promise to be better about it when things settle down a bit!

Speaking of not having a spare moment, the house is finally to the lock-up stage, so the days of having other people to do all the work for us are over, and my husband is officially (as of this evening) on 6 weeks of "holidays", during which we're hoping to get the house to a point that we can actually move in. It likely won't be anywhere near finished at that point, but it will be easier to plug away at things once we're living there, so that's the goal.

This is more or less what the house looks like at the moment (there are a few extra windows and doors now), and I am totally in love! I know it doesn't look like much yet, but I'm very excited nonetheless.

From this side you can see the decks (the closest one is off the dining room, and the small one on the other end is off our bedroom). The pile of gravel on the left is our septic field, which has since been buried.

This is my favorite part of the house so far - the underside of the roof over the front porch, with it's lovely curved brace. The brace is in the wrong place at the moment (it should have been on the outside edge - don't get me started!), but I love the way the soffits look with the rafters.

The first step in our journey starts tomorrow, when we'll start papering the exterior walls so things stay dry inside, and after that we'll move on to the wiring, insulation, and drywall. The scope of the work ahead of us is more than a little overwhelming, but we're trying to keep cool heads about it.

I'll try to post a few photos occasionally, but until then, I hope everyone has a great spring and I'll see you sometime in May!

Restoration

I've been living for the past year and a half with a dresser that only has two functioning drawers. The gliders for the other four have lost all of the little ball bearings that are supposed to make them slide smoothly in and out, and they've seized into a permanent state of not-quite-open/not-quite-closed. If I'm lucky, I can pull a drawer out just far enough to reach in and grab the article of clothing closest to the top, but there are things in the backs of those drawers that I've completely forgotten about over these long months.

I took a quick glance through Craigslist last week and found this antique dresser for $50, and while it was in obvious need of some serious care and attention, it had sturdy dove-tailed drawers (with no gliders to break), and I could tell that it had good "bones".

I had no intention of trying to strip it down to the original wood, so it got a good sanding and priming, and the hardware went into the crockpot to remove the layers of paint that had accumulated on them over the years.

I went to my favorite green building supply yesterday and was lucky enough to find a can of "mis-tint" Safecoat cabinet paint in exactly the colour I wanted (at a reduced price!).

After a few coats of "Autumn" white, the old girl was looking almost as good as new:

A good scrub with a wire brush got the paint out of all the nooks and crannies on the drawer pulls, and they're looking much nicer now. I can't decide whether to leave these handles in place, or whether I should go look for some glass ones to replace them (I just think glass might look better with the white paint).

My favorite part of this dresser is the daisy medallion along the bottom edge.

We've gotten a lot of our furniture from Freecycle and Craigslist over the years for very little or no money. Often all these treasures need is just a little elbow grease and TLC to turn them into something really unique and beautiful.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go use the Jaws of Life to extricate my wardrobe from the grips of my "old" dresser.

Good Omens

Whew! Things are starting to fly along at lightening speed around here! We're in a rush to find things like fixtures so that the plumbing rough-in can happen (it's starting this weekend!), as well as finalizing a few other things.

We bought two of our kitchen appliances yesterday, so I can move on to dreaming about other things now (toilets, maybe?). We found a very nice man who sells scratch and dent appliances for about half the cost of new (all tested, and with a six month warranty).

The stove that we bought doesn't have anything wrong with it (it was a floor model), and the dishwasher only has a very slight ding on the side, which you'll never see once it's recessed into the cabinets. Buying slightly damaged appliances has allowed us to upgrade to much higher quality units. We got the Kenmore Elite range with convection oven for about what we would have paid for a entry level coil top. The dishwasher is a Whirlpool Gold energy star model.

Over the past few weekends while at the house, we've noticed that we seem to have a pair of ravens living on or around our property. Ravens hold special meaning for me, so I see this as a very good omen for our life there.

In addition, while we were sitting enjoying the sunshine last Sunday, we noticed the distinct sound of owl calls coming from the woods behind us, and since my husband's family crest is an owl, we're taking this as a positive sign as well. With the reality of our future mortgage becoming clearer, we're looking for all the reassurance we can get! ;D

Spring Fever

First off, thank you all so much for your input regarding appliances, it was a huge help! It sounds like the consensus is to go with white, and I think I've found the ones that I want (more on that later). I saw an ad for Heartland Appliances recently that said "Stainless steel belongs in your cutlery drawer", so I'm taking that as a sign. I've even found a line of pressure canners that can be used on ceramic cooktops in case we decide to go that route.

The weather has been downright warm here the last several days, and I'm finding myself with a bad case of spring fever. It's so bad that I've actually been walking around with butterflies in my stomach, like something really exciting is going to happen. This happens to me every year, and it probably explains why most of the big things in my life happen in March when I'm totally abuzz. I never realize how much these dark winter days (which I love, don't get me wrong!) affect me until spring arrives and I turn into a totally different (giddy) creature.
Part of the excitement might have something to do with our house actually looking like a house:

This photo cracks me up. It looks like I managed to catch a tiny cat walking on the fence, but it's actually the neighbor's border collie picking up the stick that I'd just thrown for her - perspective is everything!

My husband and I have been doing the weekly site cleanup instead of paying one of our contractor's guys to it, and it also ensures that as much is being reused and recycled as possible. We pulled nails from our plywood concrete forms for one of our soon-to-be neighbors to use, and we're going to use the left over 2 x 4's to frame in our basement walls. The plastic that comes wrapped around the pallets of wood has been recycled, as have the leftover bits of rebar and metal strapping. Any wood scraps are being sorted and saved for later building projects (the future garden shed and/or chicken coop) , with anything too small being earmarked for the wood stove. Our contractor said that the other house he's currently working on has had three skids worth of garbage hauled away already, but so far we haven't even needed one, and they're nearly finished! I'm hoping we can avoid getting one altogether.

With this warm spell, the ground has started to thaw, and I spent a good portion of our clean-up day planting bulbs. Most of them were wildflowers which I planted on the edge of the wooded areas where they will naturalize over the coming years. My garden fever has been so bad that I've already been to my favorite nursery (even though I have nowhere to plant anything yet), and I've even started a few seeds (just sweet onions so far).

I'm not the only one who's been enjoying the sunshine. While we were out the other day, we saw three eagles riding the air currents over the park we were picnicking at, and when we got home later that day, we heard this guy calling from a tree behind the house (my daughter took this great photo):

Clouds moved in for a while today, but luckily they went away long enough for us to get a glimpse of the lunar eclipse that occured this evening.

I think there's more rain in the forecast, but I've had a taste of spring now and there's no going back. The cherry trees will be blooming soon, and then it'll be game over. I can almost feel the dirt under my nails!

Appliance Overload

With our house progressing, we're frantically trying to finalize things like appliances and finishing details because we know we're not going to have time to do so once we're in the middle of insulating, drywalling, and all that fun stuff. I've been scouring Craigslist looking for a good deal, but we haven't really settled on what we're looking for yet, so that's making things a little difficult.
I'm feeling a huge amount of pressure to go along with the current trend toward high end stainless steel appliances, and while I do like the look of them , I don't love the inflated price (or their tendency to attract fingerprints). I don't really mind the look of nice white appliances, including coil elements, which seem to be on their way to extinction. In fact, my dream would be to get a set of refurbished antique appliances (I adore the look of fridges and stoves from the 1940's and 50's), with their white enamel and shiny chrome accents, but the price is prohibitive. I've looked at getting originals that haven't yet been updated, and while that is technically recycling, their high energy requirement is a turnoff. We're going for a "modern farmhouse" look for out kitchen (wood floors, beadboard, and other vintage touches), so I think good quality white appliances would look fine, especially if we throw in a few stainless touches elsewhere (knobs, faucets, etc.).
Clearly I need some help solving my dilemma, and I'm hoping that some of you might take the time to weigh in with your opinion on this matter. What do you prefer? White or stainless? Coil or ceramic cooktop (gas isn't an option)? Convection or not? Bottom or top mount refrigerator? Is there a particular brand that you swear by (or swear off)? Why?
Please help!

Grooming Behavior

This week's news headlines have been filled with reports of chemicals in baby products and their possible toxicity. The main concern of this latest report is over phthalates, which are added to plastics to make them more flexible and have lately been raising concerns over their use in toys, as they are suspected carcinogens and hormone disrupters. It turns out that phthalates are also regularly added to personal care products in order to increase the longevity of the fragrance, as well as to increase the absorption of lotions into the skin.

The main reaction to this latest information seems to be one of helplessness. Many people feel like there's nothing that can be done, as these chemicals are in everything (even though they're not listed on the labels) and are seemingly impossible to avoid. While it does take some careful shopping, alternatives are certainly out there. I've been allergic to most mainstream grooming products for almost 20 years now (I'm convinced that this is some kind of payback for my "product" addiction as a teen), so I've had to find products without any kind of artificial colors, chemicals or fragrance whatsoever. It can be a little frustrating, but it is possible, and it's a small price to pay for eliminating the eczema and skin irritation that I experienced previously.

The best place to start when looking for healthier alternatives is your local health food store - I gave up shopping in the beauty department of drugstores and supermarkets years ago. However, not everything being sold as "natural" actually is - many of these products (even ones labelled as "organic") still contain irritants and questionable ingredients. Look for short ingredient lists, with things that you actually recognize listed on the label. There's a good list of things to avoid located here.

Another option is to make your own products, which gives you total control over what's going onto your skin, and can save you money. One of my favorite books on this topic is Natural Beauty at Home by Janice Cox, which is packed with recipes for everything from lipgloss to hairspray. Cranberry Lane is a great local company that sells everything you need to make your own delicious homemade goodies. Not only will these things be better for your family and the environment, but it's a lot of fun too. Kids love making their own flavored lipbalm and bath bombs, and it makes a great birthday party or sleepover activity!

We seem to have been duped into believing that we need this stuff in order to make ourselves look and smell better, but it's absolutely not true. I used to spend a fortune on mousse, gel, and hairspray to get my hair looking how I wanted it (bear in mind, it was the 80's), but now I don't use anything and my hair is shinier and fluffier than ever. I was also convinced that if I found just the right cleansing routine, I'd end up looking like Cindy Crawford, but now I use nothing but a bar of olive oil or goat's milk soap, and I'm happy to report that I don't look any less like Cindy than I did before.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a total ascetic when it comes to these things. I definitely love things that smell nice, but now I just have to have them around me, not on me (and they can't be artificial!). And while I don't wear full make-up like I used to, I still wear a lick of mascara and a touch of blush if I'm going out. It took a long time to find brands that didn't make my face peel off, but I can get away with a little bit of it now and then.

It only makes sense that if we shouldn't be exposing ourselves to these chemicals through our personal care products, we shouldn't be using them to clean our house either. Detergents with any kind of fragrance or chemicals drive my skin crazy, and if I walk into someone's house that's been cleaned with regular harsh cleaners, I'll have sneezing fits for an hour (I used to think that people with allergies were either wimps or faking it - can you say Karma?). I get by with baking soda, vinegar and liquid soap for most of my cleaning, with a dash of my favorite essential oil for a little added zip(there's nothing like a little lemon, lavender, pine, mint, or eucalyptus oil to make things smell really fresh and clean!).

It gives me the heebie jeebies to thing about the chemicals that get dumped into our water supply every day. Next time you reach for that harsh cleaning product, stop and ask yourself how you'd feel about stirring a bit of it into your next glass of water, because that's exactly where it all eventually ends up.

But what about killing germs, you might ask? By now, most of us know that taking antibiotics unnecessarily is creating strains of superbugs that are resistant to antibiotics, yet we think nothing of using anti-bacterial products in our homes, and they also contribute to resistant strains of bacteria. If we're careful and avoid splashing raw chicken juice around our kitchens, most of these things are unnecessary anyway, and it has been suggested that children who are raised in very sterile environments have higher rates of asthma and gastrointestinal illness. It turns out that a little bit of dirt is good for us.

Having this chemical senstivity has, for the most part, been a royal pain in the you-know-what, but it has also been a blessing in disguise. If you suffer from itchy, sensitive skin, eczema (my doctor was convinced for years that the rash on my arms was a fungal infection), or other unexplained skin irritation, watching what you put on your body or clean your house with might make a difference. Even if you don't have such a visible reaction to these unwanted additives, choosing milder products will decrease your family's exposure to potentially toxic chemicals, keep our water clean, save you some money, and maybe even prevent future health problems. How can you go wrong?