Vancouver!

here are a few pictures of my beautiful family in Vancouver: anisa, kerry, and my love ian.


ian and i flew there this time and instead of a 12 hour drive there it was a one hour plane ride, and instead of a towed tour through the rockies due to car problems we had only about 15 minutes of turbulance on the way back. am i convinced flying is the way to go? NOPE! i would drive again any day, but ian though alyssa and james would be a bit upset if our car broke down again and we missed their wedding. fair enough honey...we drove. but in car news, here is a great photo of rory (wonderful husband of my wonderful cousin leslIE) fixing our car after taking us out for breakfast and picking up the tab! and he just had those coveralls in his trunk all ready to save the day, what a guy!

one last picture i took specifically for my sister. when we drove back from vancouver last time ian and i were quoting from Lord of the Rings, as we often do, and while doing so we turn a corner and find we are entering...



MORDOR!

a few pictures of our latest endeavour: the front hall.

we were working on several things simultaneously...the floor, which was more pink linoleum,


knocking out the wall which served to make the house into two self-contained suites,


re-painting the walls, putting faux-beams in the ceiling, and stripping the banister b/c the last paint job included saw dust right in the paint.


before we could afford tools ian was just smashing his head through the drywall (both layers) to make holes.

They're done!
gorgeous stairs. finished stairs. shiny stairs. no cat-hair stairs. the first finished project that was not purely for survival (read: leaking plumbing, hand installing the recycled newspaper insulation). they are done! the only thing that went astrew with the last efforts was that my home improvement book (thanks auntie!!!) said "a great idea for staining or painting stairs is to paint first the left half of each stair and then the right". sounds totally reasonable, so we did this. unfortunately it left a dark line in the centre of every stair where the two sides overlapped. so we just layered on some more and went a bit darker than we originally planned. here are a few extra shots just to remind you how gross the carpet was, then how much fur, glue, tile and other crap there was, then what they looked like stripped without stain. the last one is also where the vacuum fell on my head while we were sanding. it hurt!

mainly photo updates this time. last time i updated (march) i lined up a bunch of photos to post, but it was waaayyyy too much for our plugged-in-wired-wireless lite-speed-high-speed internet. so here are many that you will hopefully be able to see.

here is the pink plaid lino that was under the living room carpet...turns out it was under the floor in every room on the main floor. hmmm...and this picture is just of me because a) i was pulling up the living room carpet ENTIRELY by myself (yes, yes, it was b/c i was mad at ian, not b/c he refused to help me!) and b) i had just got my hair cut. so pulling up the carpet was fun, and not too difficult. the hardest part by far was that we did not move any furniture out of the room, so i was wiggling full bookshelves (x4) a couch, the stereo (still plugged in, x4 pieces) and coffee tables out from under the carpet onto the lovely pink lino but i could not really lift them BY MYSELF over top of the ridges and humps i was making as i pulledback the carpets. too bad this picture only shows my hair and not my newly formed bicepts!