this old cat-house

Sunday, August 19, 2007


our old deck was a disaster. it had 2 by 4 supports instead of 4 by 4, it was not cemented into the ground, the stairs were rotting out and it was covered in furry carpet. i thought it was at least passable since the only people who had been injured on it were trick-or-treating 4 years olds, clumsy on the best of surfaces, but when my dad visited he said it had to be the first thing to go. so on canada day weekend we built a new deck.

off to totem we went, where we were quoted about $1300 to make the whole thing. enter jenny's improvising and ian's attention to safety and here it is at a cost of under $400.
the pathway is made from broken bits of patiostone, courtesy of totem's garbage pile, the lattice is from our ugly backyard fence, and the flowers are from someone's garden. i am happy to say that most of them lived through the transplant and the summer. (i hve no idea why all this font is underlined. i can't make it stop though, so let's just go with it)

finally, in response to everyone who thinks edmonton is un-lush and un-lovely, here is our garden in mid july. it has since grown so much more, and we have so many little squashies and tomatoes we could have a roadside stand. things grow here, and it is warm and sunny all summer. we LOVE you edmonton!


our front hallway used to be a four ft by four ft sqaure room acting as a foyer leading to seperate upstairs and downstairs apartments. in addition to the lovely tasha mccann in this pic you can see the wall that divided the two apartments, as well as the lovely laminate flooring. we knocked that wall down a long time ago, re-did the stairs (ahhh, our first project) and recently pulled up the flooring and refinished some hardwood as well as putting down slate tile. the tiling was really fun, but cleaning up the grout off slate was tough. poor ian wanted to stop hours before we finished but it just kept smudging. anytime you apply a damp cloth it smudges more and more. but here is is done, and i think it's looking pretty fine.



dining room. although it has been painted for a long time i just have not shown it off. the windows are new though. if you look at the old picture you might notice that there is an ugly denim curtain on one of the walls. this curtain covers a hole in the wall where a window had been and was smashed out. when we moved in there were still shards of glass in the wall and window frame, but no longer!

the windows came from habitat for humanity, so it is never any guarantee that one will find a window that is exactly, or even close to, the size of the window frame. case in point, the window that is on the left side of the table is two totally different sized windows with a big trim to hide the evidence. the window business is a great example of where our two brains work perfectly together (i promise this is not newly wed bliss...we fight a lot about other stuff..hem hem, the white floor). i have an easy time picturing things in my head and just imagining random things together as a solution (the leaky basement and the front deck) and ian is amazing at knowing what the book says and how things SHOULD work, and of course is best at lifting heavy things. so the point is, at HFH there are a million windows in a hot parking lot in no order at all. so we walk and walk trying to find the perfect size only to discover that our hole in the wall (no, not our house, the actual hole is what i am talking about here) is not a common sized hole. so we decide to buy a taller window and just cut through the wall to make it fit. so we buy two windows to make up the width, different widths and slightly different heights and here you go...double paned windows that seal. hurrah!


spare room: come stay in the comfort of our new spare bedroom, painted a warm tangerine colour, with tasteful (questionable?) white wood floors, and a delightful wrought iron bed ordered specially from one of the many pawn shops on 118th avenue (also known as Avenue of Champions!).

yayyy! we finished one room upstairs. not that it is really a rush now that we love edm
onton and want to stay here for a long (well, long for us) time. anisa was the first person to stay in this room and i was so happy she had something other than a futon to sleep on. talk about finally making it in the world when college friends come stay and get their own room and bed. haha. here she is actually..doesn't she look happy and well rested after a weekend in that bedroom?