House News - Out In The Sticks Y'All

Wow, Fall has completely gotten away from me. It was early September one minute and then suddenly - boom! - it's mid-November.

Sooooo, all of the repairs and updates we were doing to the house at the end of August/beginning of September were because.....we're moving! We've bought a house out in the sticks - about 20 minutes from where we are now.

Here's the story - every week or so we would casually look around on Realtor.ca, just seeing what was out there. We've been wanting to move out of town for a long time, where we could have an acre or two for the dogs to run around on, and where Tom could have some space to play with his cars. The only thing holding us back was the price tag. Real estate prices are just out of control here. We could never find anything we liked that wasn't either far out of our budget or needed an enormous amount of work to be liveable.

We talked about it and decided that if we really wanted to move this year we would have to raise our upper spending limit. So we picked out 4 houses to look at that ranged from an acre to 27 acres and went on a tour one Sunday with our agent. We fell in love with the second house we looked at - a 3-bedroom raised bungalow on 15 acres. And the crazy thing was that it was within our budget - our original budget. I think it was meant to be.

My favourite feature is the deck - it runs the entire width of the house, so we'll be able to have multiple seating areas - covered and uncovered. We plan to install French doors off of the master bedroom (far right) and change up the sliders on the left to French doors as well. Eventually we may have a walk-out from the basement to the backyard.

Tom's excited because the property already has a concrete pad poured, ready for a shop to be built. We're going to extend the backyard lawn further out - closer to the shop - and plant a row of trees (cedar?) along the back edge to soften the view of the shop a bit. It will be part auto shop, with two bays and a hoist, and part woodworking shop, with room to get our DIY on. We're going to build it tall enough that we'll be able to have a loft above part of it for storage.

The property goes back another 3000 feet from the shop - there is a trail through the woods and several clearings.  I can't wait to take the dogs for walks back there. They love tromping through the forest, smelling the new smells and chasing each other. We even found a tree fort!

The house itself is in great shape - nothing needs to be done right away so we'll be able to take our time and plan our projects. I have so many ideas though. The basement is unfinished - I'm looking forward to having a blank slate to work with. I'll post photos of the inside once the current owner's belongings are no longer there.

It's on a nice, quiet road, just a few minutes from the highway. I'll have about a 30 minute drive to work, and we're only 20 minutes from the grocery store. It's going to be strange being back out in the country again, but it only took us a year or two of living in town to realize that we aren't urban people.

Once we finalized the offer on the new house, it was a mad scramble to get our house ready for market. Not that there was a lot that had to be done, we just wanted to present the best package we could. We have an awesome real estate agent - I can't believe the photos and the brochure she produced. It made our place look like a show home. We held off offers for a week, had over 50 showings (!), and ended up with eight offers. Madness. This was so different than our last selling experience where we listed for two months and only had two offers.

As soon as I take a break from packing (3 weeks to go!) I'll post a current house tour - it's amazing to look back on all of the changes we've made over the past six years.

Fresh Paint

While our neighbour was having all the fun laying sod in our backyard, Tom & I were repairing and then repainting the wood above and below the front bay window.

When we first replaced the wood and painted - almost 3 years ago (I had to look back) - we ran out of time to finish the area above the neighbour's window. We were using a 20 foot ladder at the time and the weather was starting to change - windy and rainy almost every weekend. Tom decided to retire the ladder for the year, and then it was a case of out of sight, out of mind.

But we would remember once in a while, so we decided to just get it done. Over the last three years the paint has started to peel a bit, so it all needed fresh paint anyway. Those windows are exposed to all of the elements, and we've had some pretty harsh winters these last couple of years.

This time Tom decided to rent a Genie lift instead of messing around with a ladder. Technically it's called a "trailer-mounted Z-boom." You can rent it on a Friday night, return it on Sunday (when they're closed) and they only charge you for one day. The boom goes up to 55 feet and holds two people, plus you can move it around while you're up there, so we were able to get the work done many times faster than we would have with a ladder.

Fun side note: Tom just parked the lift in our driveway the first night - with the support legs down of course. In the morning he decided to move it over so that he could reach both windows without having to reposition it. He engaged the parking brake, lifted the legs, and...the whole thing started rolling down the driveway into the street (and possibly up into the neighbour's driveway on the other side). Apparently the parking brake was just for show.

Tom was holding on tight, trying to slow it down and I'm running beside him asking, "What should I do? What should I do?" What could I do? He got it slowed down enough that it stopped in the street and didn't hit any cars, but I'll admit that my heart was racing for a good long bit afterwards. And you can be sure that the wheels were chocked at all times after that.

This is Tom bringing our little runaway back home.

So, on with the show. We scraped off all of the loose paint from below the windows, then I puttied and spackled wherever it was needed. Tom was the main painter so he spent most of the weekend in the air. I went up a few times to sand and to take pictures. We even went up above the roof to get an aerial view of the neighbourhood.

Tom gave the windows a good three coats of fresh paint and they look new again. Now I just have to touch up the garage door frames and we'll be done with the front (I think).

Greening Up the Backyard

Did you laugh when I told you back in July that we were hoping to have our new grass installed a week after we finished the under-deck enclosure? It's a good thing I didn't put any money down on it happening because it took us a month.

This is what our backyard has looked like for the last couple of years. Anyone with dogs knows that it is really hard to keep your grass alive with those pee machines (poop factories?) around - especially when there isn't much room for them to spread out their, ahem, deposits. We patched some of it a couple of times, seeded it at least once, and then finally just ignored it for as long as we could.

Here is a beautiful shot from the day the under-deck enclosure was finished. Keep your shoes on at all times, right?

And here it is now -

Big difference. Big. Huge.

The first step to a new backyard was to get rid of all of the old grass. Some of the soil under the old grass wasn't very nice, so we scraped down several inches to get a nice level area to build on. Our backyard is only about 20 feet by 20 feet, yet we managed to fill the bed of the pickup truck twice - which meant two long trips to empty it before we could move on.

We ordered new soil from a local place, Zander Sod. When Tom saw the two giant bags sitting in the driveway he said we'd ordered way too much (I disagreed). We spent two evenings that week trucking it to the backyard a cartful at a time, and found out that even with two bags we still didn't have enough.(I told you so.) It took a few days to get more soil, but once we had a third bag spread out it was looking pretty good.

This is after 2 bags and unfortunately through a window, so I apologize for the picture quality.

We tamped it all down and had our neighbour come over to inspect. He's a greenskeeper and knows his stuff. His backyard is gorgeous and I'm sure sometimes he likes to pretend he doesn't know us. :-)

We put it in high-gear this past weekend and decided to repair and repaint the upper windows at the front of the house, all while laying the sod between coats. Ambitious, I know. We're in a semi-detached so we were going to paint the aforementioned neighbour's windows too. When discussing our plans, the neighbour said he would be happy to lay all the sod for us if we would do all the painting as he's afraid of heights. Sweet deal. Not only was our sod laid properly, he did the whole thing in about an hour. It took us the weekend to finish the painting, but I still think we came out the winners.

So here again is our new and improved backyard. I can't express how wonderful it is to walk across the yard not worrying about thistles or rocks (or poops, because we aren't letting the dogs out there until the grass has a chance to root.) This whole experience has been great for the dogs because without a backyard we've had no choice but to take them for walks at least twice a day.

We don't have any plants or trees back there yet, except for my beloved purple smoke bush. We had a huge one at our last house  - well over 15 feet high. It was so easy to care for, and so beautiful, even when it wasn't flowering, that we had to have another one. This one is already starting to poke up over the fence and it's only been two years.

But we don't know what else we want to add. This year a vine from the other side of the fence (it's all field back there) worked its way over the top of our fence in a couple of spots and hangs down with green leaves and red berries. It's taken absolutely no effort on our part (my favourite kind of plant) and has added some much needed colour and depth to the space.

We also changed up the sidewalk area by the gate. Before, it was about 10 feet long and we wondered, Why? It doesn't lead anywhere except to the grass. So we pulled out 6 or so feet of it - back to the edge of the house, removed the screenings, and put down grass.

In every area we're going for the appearance of a larger yard, and the unbroken expanse of grass really does make the yard look bigger. Or am I delusional from being out in the sun all weekend?