And the Lord said ‘Let there be WINDOWS’
See that?? That right there?!?! That is me doing my happy dance. After nearly FOUR MONTHS of sourcing, quoting, choosing frame styles, then re-sourcing, re-quoting, picking colours, making custom orders, manufacture lead time, and of course what felt like ENDLESS waiting
Behind the Dream: How we’re financing our home renovation
Ok guys. It's that time. In the spirit of keepin it real, we've decided to address the screaming purple elephant in the room because frankly, a lot of people are nosy curious. Seriously, we've had neighbours see our house going up & do everything from dance around the issue, to flat out ask what we do & how much we make! So today we're talking about money. Up to this point we've been a bit hesitant to touch on the subject because it tends to be one of those hot-button issues that is hard wired to people's emotions & a lot
Confessions of a BlogPodium virgin
I have a confession to make. Well, a few actually. But the first is I've spent the better part of this week in a post-vacation funk. Does that ever happen to you? You spend a week in tropical bliss - away from the stresses of your daily life - only to return & have it all come crashing back down on you? Surely I'm not alone in this. Well today, I've made a decision to pull myself out of the funk. I'm back to blogging today because writing always makes me feel better & I'm choosing to let go of
5 years. A 4 year old. 3 addresses. 2 hearts. 1 lifetime.
5 years ago today on a rainy afternoon, perched on a cliff at the edge of paradise, I married my best friend. Although we'd been together as a couple for many eight years prior, that day was the beginning of a new chapter for us. Today marks the anniversary of what I like to call the "grown up" phase of our life together and in celebration of the pride I feel in reaching that milestone, I thought I'd offer you a glimpse behind the Dreamhouse. We'll be taking a look back at some of the moments that have made the
Getting BlogPodium ready!
As some of you know, this Saturday Kes & I are attending BlogPodium, a conference for Canadian design and lifestyle bloggers where we'll get to meet & network with 250 professionals, & fellow house obsessed bloggers like ourselves! This will be our first blogger conference so I'm incredibly nervous excited! My twitter feed this week has been all a buzz with talk of 'what to wear' so I thought I'd share how we'll be expressing our blogger style this weekend. With any conference, there is always the potential to make important connections, so it goes without saying that I want to look
Go go gadget house!
With the window wait nearly over & the basement prep work complete, we're finally back to focusing on our plans for the main living space. We thought we'd take a break from all of the heavy construction talk & get a little bit into some of the fun stuff. Anyone who knows us knows we're a gadget family. We eat, sleep & breathe technology. So its only fitting that we'd be curious about cool ways to integrate technology into our home. In a perfect world we'd go full on Tony Stark and have J.A.R.V.I.S. running things, but since Kes is not
The basement continued: The quest for more headroom
Things are moving along in the basement. We decided to use a bench-footing technique to gain more headroom. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, "bench-footing" is similar to "underpinning" which are both basically just fancy pants construction words for the process of lowering the basement floor. A house's foundation is tricky business. You can't simply dig down a basement floor without reinforcing the structure because the weight of the house would cause the foundation walls to slide inwards and crack the walls above. Yikes!! Here's a diagram that shows how a new 'bench-footing' style foundation is created
Switching focus: Planning the basement
In our last post I mentioned that we've been biding our time until the windows arrive. As you know, up until now, we've primarily been focusing our construction efforts on the main living space of the house. But now that we've got a little time to burn, we're switching our focus to the basement. Let's start by taking a peek at the plans
Window waiting woes…
You might have noticed things on the construction front have come to a bit of a standstill lately. Well they haven't entirely - we've merely switched our focus from the main area of the house to another. More on that in a bit - but first here are a few of the lessons we've learned in the last several weeks: Windows are expensive. Ok so that's not really something new that we learned. But geeeez! They're made of vinyl & glass people
Kash’s Birthday weekend according to my iPhone
It feels like its been a million years since my last blog post - and in blog terms it kinda has been. Sorry about that. But honestly, now that my hand is getting stronger, I've been way more motivated to be outside enjoying what little summer weather we've had, than being stuck underneath my laptop. This weekend though, was Kash's 4th birthday & I thought I'd share some of the fun we got up to - and a few of the DIY endeavours I managed to pull off (because I'm crazy & notorious for taking on waay too much and then