The Foyer: Before and During

The front entrance is still awaiting a set of French doors to the hub room. In the meantime, why not tackle the entrance itself?

Here's a view of the front entrance from the hub room - this is before the hub room was finished - see the interior window, complete with blinds? Weird.

This is the direct opposite view of the previous shot...now with the hub room finished...the window has been removed, stud added and drywalled from the other side. Warm and welcoming entry, no?

It is definitely warm (and I like to think I'm a pretty welcoming hostess if you're prepared to ignore the construction). The radiator gives off heat during the winter like IT'S the boiler. As grateful as I am for that, I'm not keen on the many layers of paint covering the radiator. In order not to add to the problem, the cover must come off. I was originally going to have it sandblasted and then sprayed, but now I'm thinking about getting Hammersmith to make a custom cover. They did a bit of work for Norm in our last house. A small bit in comparison to this house where I also want them to build our hoodfan for the kitchen.

There are places that make all types of radiator covers - and we'll be back when we get to the living room's baseboard heaters. This is nice, but probably too deep and would interfere with the glass when we get the hub room doors in. I'm thinking something copper or brushed steel. Hammersmith will work from a sketch too: here's one idea.

Here's Rory giving the pre-work tool inspection. I really have to find a place where he can put that nose to work. He MUST sniff absolutely everything.

Sniffing takes a lot of out of dog. So does supervising. Note the yawn.

Cover off.

These shelves, and the lovely yellow acrylic insert are on the left side when you walk in, opposite wall from the radiator. Obviously dated, but they would have to go in any event since my experience is that any surface area becomes the default repository for whatever you walk in the door with. (Another good reason not to use the deeper style of radiator above - a key shelf is one thing, but if you can put your groceries on it it's too big.)

Even getting rid of the acrylic helps! These shelves, like all the casing and baseboard in the house, are solid mahogany. We'll repurpose the wood. Somewhere.

All gone. It opens right up into the living room. We'll not be wanting it quite that open, so we're looking at a glass waterwall. Think something like this only smaller scale.

The base the shelves sat on is hollow (making for relatively easy installation of the central vacuum inlet last fall) and it currently holds a planter box. A south facing yard with low maintenance perennials is one thing, I don't think anybody wants to see me torture plants inside a north-facing entrance. The light fixture is new, purchased in Edmonton for a pretty deep discount. The old one went to my cousin's cabin - rustic to rustic I say.

The other source of light is the skylight. Or whatever it is. Again with the acrylic covering inside, then a square tunnel of mirrors out to the roof. One of the mirrors has to be replaced and the cover has got to go.

Now THAT'S more like it!

Here's the Calgary weather I know. Callous disregard for the brave bits of greenery that dare show themselves before May (and sometimes even after).

Springing Forth

Back in mid-March I spent a weekend out in the back yard putting together my lasagne garden. If you were here helping me lug compost from the bins at the far end of the yard to dump them in the new garden (then to discover that ants had taken up residence in the compost bin) you are a true friend. You know who you are. You get the first jar of salsa. And there, tucked safely in the corner where the sun room meets the back of the house we discovered shoots of green with tiny buds that by today had blossomed into the sunshiney brightness that only daffodils possess. And I don't even really LIKE daffodils. But hey, it's a flower and it's growing in my yard! Without any assistance from me. Which is probably all the better given my track record with plants and such. What's a lasagne garden? Since my thumb isn't naturally green, and since the thought of turning sod wasn't getting me so excited I bounced out of bed on Saturday mornings, I thought that if there was going to be a vegetable garden out back, there had to be a better way. Lasagne gardening is also known as sheet composting and there are books and websites - all of which I hope aren't leading me astray. We have layers of wet cardboard (a good use for some of those packing boxes), leaves, compost, topsoil, leaves, compost, etc... all sitting moistly under a heavy tarp, cooking away until the end of May. It's where I hope to plant some heirloom tomato seedlings and a few other things that are currently germinating on top of the boiler or already sprouted and sitting in the kitchen window. I've put the garden where we are planning to eventually put a patio. My plan is simply to move the accumulated garden soil to another suitable location in the yard. Like maybe where the sunroom is now. In the meantime, I've done us a favour because the grass where the patio is supposed to go will be gone. Voila! Now we can install patio stones. I'm thinking slate.

THE GUTS OF IT

I gave a presentation at work recently where I drew an analogy between the type of work my group does and the background work that goes into getting a fire truck where it has to be. Same thing can be said for house renovations: the background work is sorely under appreciated. Lots of times I hear from people (the ones that are too scared to actually come over and visit...) asking if we're done yet. Excuse me? Budgetary considerations aside, let's not forget to factor in that Norm and I are doing this work ourselves, after putting in a full day of the kind of work that helps actually pay the bills. What else? Well, it's a fairly big house. Things take time to decide. Then there's the inevitable mind changing (mine) and eureka discoveries of even better ways to do things (Norm's). But the main thing is that quite a bit of what we're doing isn't visible even if people did come to visit. Unless of course they're interested in the inner workings of home theatre wiring, satellite and network cable pulling. Or our boiler room...

A real-honest-to-goodness boiler. If you ignore the dust, it is a marvelous place to let bread dough rise. Perfect temperature. The boiler itself is original to the house which puts it at about 50 years old and still chugging away. Surely there are newer, more energy efficient models I could replace it with but the quote I was given has scared the thought right out of me. It would take another 50 years to pay itself off in potential energy savings. And it won’t proof the bread dough. I’m also helping keep up the demand for natural gas. Some companies are banking on this.

So we’ll keep it. The house was toasty warm all winter long despite some real cold snaps. And the monthly gas bill wasn’t any more than at the last house where we had a 30 year old gas fired forced air furnace. We have made some concessions to modernity though. A new hot water tank to replace the circa 1980s one. Besides, insurance won’t cover any damage if the old tank leaks. You can see the new one – not installed yet – standing next to the boiler in this photo.


Here’s the old one:

I think copper is pretty. New copper doesn’t match old copper though so I’ll have to learn to live with the variance. The red thing? Yet another invisible improvement - central vacuum. Not just a new canister, but an entire install including running the hose/pipe through the walls and creating outlets. Or would those be inlets?






The new copper pipes are for the new water conditioner. The one the house came with wasn't hooked up and looked like it could have doubled for a cruise missile. One complaint I have about this part of the city is the hardness of the water. You can actually see the buildup in Rory’s water bowl, and it’s not like I don’t wash it frequently. Also, the window on the front load washer is getting hazy. And I’m going through buckets of skin lotion. Here’s the new gizmo, plumbed in courtesy of Norm, but not turned on just yet:

 








I understand that there are servers humming away in the dwarf-space under the stairs – Norm showed them to me, but as long as they work, I don’t visit them. Heck, even if they didn’t work I wouldn’t go see them. And what old house reno would be complete without routers and the other bits of wizardry that enable me to spew forth blog postings to the masses?

Sure, we’re almost done. Not. But I have a lot to be grateful for. I see it even if you don’t. On that note, I’m going to go take my plumber, cable puller, network installer, researcher, electrician, and general handyman out for supper. Just the two of us. It's the least I can do for the man who has yet to send me an invoice for any of this work. Maybe I chose the wrong title for this post. It should be more along the lines of "The Heart of it". Right, Norm?

Choice and Compromise

Before we moved, I got rid of six boxes of books. It was hard, but I had comfortably adapted to the Sony e-Reader that Norm bought for me the Christmas before last and wasn't in the mood to buy new bookcases to accommodate the book overflow syndrome in my living room. This time around, it was easier. A bit. We don't have as much wall real estate so I have four more boxes of books to donate somewhere - they never even made it to the shelves.

Other than installing the A/V equipment and new French doors and casing and a window, the hub room is done (really, sounds like a lot but in comparison to what we've done already these should be easy). So here's the last of it until everything is finished and then I'll post a few before and after shots. Thanks for sticking with us through this one. The kitchen will be even more fun!
 
Here's the hub room (see previous post for the new floor) with the book cases installed and the book sorting well under way.

  























All cleaned up.

 Don't let the regal pose fool you. He's a dork.

And now for something completely different

I finished the hub room floor on Friday!

Here's Keelan having a 'ta-da' moment. Okay, here's his bottom half having a moment, decked out in what can only be described as a bizarre jammie getup.

And here's Rory checking out Keelan and demonstrating how to actually blend into the floor - purple and plaid aren't the way to go. My mother says Rory is my colour inspiration. I'm a red-head, what can I say?

And just the floor, before I began moving the bookcases in.

Grrrrr.....

These:

...go in here...

and then the whole thing goes in the hole in the ceiling...

That is, of course, assuming that the initial painting of the speaker screens was as easy as I thought it would be. Truthfully, I painted that entire ceiling without as much slop and mess as I made painting just three screens and frames for the built-in speakers so they'd blend in with the ceiling. And don't even get me going about having to use almost an entire can of air (or "can of hair" as French speaking people might call it, not to be confused at all with the late night infomercials pedalling something that that probably wouldn't work to blow out screen holes). No matter the thickness of the paint (and I tried different consistencies, believe me) the screens kept goobering up. I don't know what kinds of interesting things you notice kicking around your house, but when you live with a techie/geek, cans of air can be found everywhere. They're about as common as shoes around here. So that's what I used. Besides, the combination of hyperventilating and breathing in paint fumes when I tried to just blow the holes out wasn't really working for me.