Groovebag

Bursting With Pictures

Alright, so it's been quite a while since my last post.
But we have been busy busy busy over here finishing up our spectacular bathroom.
And I have gobs of photos to prove it!

 This is looking from the hallway into the bathroom.
I actually found it kind of tricky to find a good angle to take all of these pictures.
I need to learn some tricks from the peeps at all of those home decorating magazines!

We bought this sink at a neighbours yard sale for 30 bucks! Faucet and taps included.

And this cast iron, claw foot tub was rescued from the dump when we happened on it abandoned in another neighbours front yard. After asking their permission, we loaded it into our car and stored it in our backyard.....for 4 years!
We took it to a local bath tub refinishing shop and voila!
My favorite new past time is soaking in this baby.

Our HUGE shower stall with a fantastic rain head shower head.
We found the shower system at a British based company that had unbelievable prices.
Unbelievably low!
We saw a similar looking system at Restoration Hardware that was $4000.00 more than what we paid for ours.
YIKES!

 

We also put a very large built in cupboard to store all sorts of bathroom type things.

 

And this is what it looked like before we got out the sledgehammers and wrecking bars.

So there you have it folks.

I gotta go......soak in the tub!

Naming of Names

It has been brought to my attention that my wonderful Husband doesn't like being referred to as Hubbie or D when I write about him here on this blog.

So, after careful consideration and discussion, I will now refer to him as my Contraband.
That is a combination of the two words CONTRACTOR and HUSBAND.

He is my Husband.

And,lately, he has also been my Contractor as we under go the massive renovations we have been doing on our house for the last 4 years.

I have to give credit for this idea to a writer whose blog I read.
She has a very clever name for her Husband and I was inspired by her wit.

Inching Towards Victory

We have been renovating our main bathroom for the last 3 months.
Just the two of us.
Well, mostly D.
I make sure that he is fed and well caffeinated.
And I help where I can be useful, which truthfully isn't very often.
But I try.

This is what our bathroom looked like when we bought our house 4 years ago.

It was functional, but not very pretty.
The previous owners had done some, ahem, work on it which involved a lot of caulking and some very questionable plumbing.

So we decided to do this.
 

That my friends is a gutted bathroom.

If we had the bathtub installed, I would be soaking in it, instead of lying on the floor wishing I was soaking in it.

A lot of work and sweat has transpired over the last 3 months and we are creeping towards completion. D and I have been tiling for the last few days.
Subway tiles look spectacular.
But man-o-man they are labour intensive to install.
So many little tiles.
So, so many.

But this is how things look right now, this very second.
The toilet will sit in the left in this picture, the pedestal sink in the middle and the cast iron, claw foot bathtub will be on the right.
Look at all of those subway tiles.
Sheesh!

And just look at this lovely, heated, marble floor.
Pure luxury and a fine upgrade from the ugly peel and stick vinyl floor tiles that were on the floor before.

And this is our shower.
It is on the wall opposite the toilet and sink.
And look at all of those subway tiles.
We decided to take a break from the endless tiling in the shower area and focus on getting the tub, sink and toilet installed.

We are nearing the end and with any luck we will be soaking in our beautiful tub this weekend.
A perfect way to spend Valentine's Day if you ask me.

Raining and Pouring

I've been working on a film set for the last week and a half, shooting mostly nights.
That's my "day job", working in the wardrobe department on film sets.
For this particular shoot, my hours have been long (average 14 hour days) and the schedule wacky....start work at 3 pm, finish at 7am the following day.
Needless to say I feel like I have a wicked case of jet lag.
And I didn't even get to fly anywhere warm and sunny!
Last night I got home from work at 3 am.
This morning I woke up to this outside our bedroom window.

We are having the city water pipe connection to our house replaced. The original pipe is lead and the lead levels in our water are too high.
So at 7:30 am the trucks, jack hammers, back hoes, saws and loud talking (ok, yelling) work men all showed up to start work on replacing the bad lead pipe.
Did I mention I got home from work at 3 am?
I popped in some ear plugs to try to block out the sound but let me tell you, nothing blocks out the sound of a back hoe ripping out your front side walk, followed by the sound of a jack hammer on concrete.
So I gave up the fight to sleep and stumbled out of bed.
And this is what I found in our basement.....
The location of our one and only fully functional bathroom, as we are renovating our master bath.

These two men, covered in mud, ripping holes in our basement floor? I don't know them.
And they are standing right at the entrance to our one and only bathroom.
What's a girl to do?

And the one and only fully functional bathroom looked like this
The window is wide open, it's freezing cold outside, and inside too now.
And there is a big hose running through the window over the bath tub and shower.
Sigh.

We do have a powder room on the main floor of our house and for now it is untouched and not full of mud covered strangers.
It will have to do.
But, the water is turned off now.
Double sigh.
However my fantastic Husband filled buckets and jugs and all manner of vessels with water before the water to our house was cut off.
So all is not lost, just a bit loud and muddy and messy.

I'm off to work now.
At least there is running water there!

The walls have secrets

When you are doing renovations you discover all sorts of buried surprises and treasures only to be found once the walls and floors and ceilings are all ripped open.
Some of the discoveries are not very good.
Like rotting galvanized steel plumbing pipes.
Or floor joists that have been cut and hacked away at.
Or frighteningly old knob and tube electrical wiring.

But then some of the discoveries are like little time capsule gems of the history of the house and it's previous occupants.
The first little treasures that we found were these:
We found them under some baseboard. I'd like to imagine that the men that built this house put them there intentionally.
There are two King George pennies, one dated 1915 and the other is dated 1920. The other coin is a King George quarter dated 1928.

When we were replacing our front door, D found these jammed in to the door frame.
It is a selection of baseball cards, hockey cards, Battle Cards from the Korean War, and something called Crazy Cards. It seems that most of them are from the 1950's.
It looked like they were placed in the door frame intentionally....almost like someone was hiding them. Hmmmm.

And our latest find was this little guy.
A little lost toy soldier.

Seeing as our house has given up these treasures we decided to bury a treasure in return.
We put together a memory box or a time capsule and buried it in one of our newly constructed walls.
Inside the box we put some photos of the interior of the house before we got our renovating hands on it, a front page from today's newspaper, some very well worn work gloves of D's, a piece of ceramic tile, and a piece of roof shingle. The roof shingle has more of a story behind it for us...but more on that another time.

Maybe some one will discover this "treaure" one day!

Special Delivery

I've always been the type to get excited when a delivery truck rolls up to the house and an eagerly awaited for package gets plopped into your arms.
Today was that kind of day.
But a double dose of delivery delirium.
Sorry, I couldn't help myself.

The first delivery involved a forklift.
I was too wrapped up in thoughts of "is the forklift driver gonna hit our neighbours car" to think to about grabbing my camera to snap a few photos of the delivery. (He was an expert forklift driver and no cars were harmed during said delivery).

Here is what we had delivered this morning.

Lots and lots of drywall.
Yup.
The bathroom renovation has progressed to the drywalling stage.
I, for one, am pretty darned excited about this. It means that we are moving into the next phase of the renovation.
There is still a crap load of work to be done but we are forging on!

And then this afternoon the Man in Brown (UPS) rang the door bell and plopped a huge box in my arms that held many smaller boxes.
There was no forklift involved in this delivery just the brown UPS truck.
But equally exciting.
Our order from Restoration Hardware arrived.
Hidden with in these boxes are our bathroom  light fixtures and glass shelf .
We won't be installing these right away, but it's exciting to see the finishing touches....even if they are still packed in boxes.

Redd Foxx should be showing up any day now

We have been using our front porch as a temporary storage area for the junk/unused/over used building materials that have been accumulating during our latest round of home renos.

It brings back memories of Sanford and son.

I think it makes an EXCELLENT anti theft system. Who in their right mind would want to break into this house?

 

Home Sweet Home

So, after we bought our house 4 years ago, we started on what has become an epic renovation process.
We knew that we would be doing this reno when we bought the house because to be perfectley honest, the house was a dump when we bought it.
But it was in a great 'hood and we could afford it.
So bit by bit, Hubbie and I have been working away at it.
We are on the last phase (hopefully the last phase!) and have ripped out our master bathroom and back spare room.
With renovations comes dust.
Lots and lots of dust.
Here's an example of the dust from a some work we did this week.

I probably should have cleared off the breakfast bar before Hubbie started hacking away at the plaster and lathe.

Then I got smrt samart smart and cleared off the breakfast bar.
Too late.
It's a never ending cycle of make a mess, clean the mess and then make more of a mess.
But the end result will be spectacular.

This picture, not so spectacular.


This is what our kitchen looked like when we bought our house

It was frightening.

Then we did this.
And it got a whole lot more frightening.
And dusty.

 
But now it looks like this.

And this.

And it does look spectacular.
So I know that in time this latest project we have taken on will also look spectacular.

In time.