Who Can Keep Living Like This

I've come to the conclusion that I am at my wits end. My house is chaos and there is no end in sight. Hubby has his priorities right and has gone off to a canoe instructors course and I think he is happy to leave this craziness behind. I on the other hand continue to struggle with the mess and make a pleasant home for us. (Snork!)

Have a look at what Hubby has run away from and what I would like to run away from too.


This is me a few days ago applying stain to the floor of Daughter #1's room floor.


This is the floor after it was finished.


This is the wall in Daughter #1's bedroom that needs staining... on the right... and the back wall that needs paneling.

I feel pretty good about Daughter #1's bedroom..... except the ceiling needs to be stained too... so here is the rest of the mess....


This is the rest of the wood for the ceiling in our bedroom and the bathroom which juts out into the entryway so that you have to be careful not to scratch your legs.



Here is the upstairs bathroom that has a shower hooked up but the toilet is just sitting there not hooked up to anything... and notice the wall behind that has no paneling..... and the shower stall which needs a false wall built to help support it...
And this is my bedroom which really scares me..


This is the his closet.....


and the hers closet... which are nothing more thans heaps of stuff...


Here is the entry to the downstairs bathroom.... we have to hang a blanket so that we can be afforded a little privacy. (notice the mess of dishes to the right that are all clean but have no shelf on which to sit....


Here is the mess in the bathroom except I just smacked out the wall at the bottom of the steps for the new door so now we are back to square one with no privacy..... and there is dirt everywhere..... and I am going to rip out the linoleum while more pictures upload to this blog...... argh!


And the dining room table looks like a tornado hit..


Under the steps is so dirt infested with dust and sawdust that I'm afraid to go near it...


The front door is still not straight since Hubby took it out to put in the tub.... we can't get the door to close properly...


Meanwhile the front porch has a mess that may or may not have been there since school closed...


And if I have a shower I have to drape the wall with towels for privacy...



I'm horrified.... we live in a dump.....I'm starting to feel like it will never end. I want my bathroom back and I want the upstairs bathroom done.... I want a kitchen where I can get supper without tipping over stuff or knocking over dishes....I want some privacy when I shower so that no one sees my fanny..... and I don't see theirs. I want this renovation done....

Meanwhile Hubby is on a lake with a paddle in a canoe for today and two more..... it's enough to get one down. Next week he is going on a fishing trip with a bunch of rangers. I hope my toilet is in by then. I'm off to paint a vanity.... and a wall.... and the floor..... and a rail..... and rip out some linoleum..... finish putting in the bathroom door and the step to the bathroom..... Oh I'm tired just thinking about it.

Challenges

So I am now in my new office. For two days I have not had access to my computer while I moved the furniture around once again.... for the millionth time! Friday morning I got up early to beat the heat. I wanted to get some painting done. All the pine paneling in the office has now had two coats of Diamond Clear Coat... a product I might add, that I have good satisfaction from. Then I painted the new desk top after removing the old one and finished the second coat yesterday morning. It is a challenge to figure out where to put things while you work in that space. I had to move the dinette set out of the sunroom so that I could clear coat the walls. But the desk and computer needed to be in the new office in order to fit the dinette in the living/dining room. Eventually I decided to make the living/dining room a heap of everything while I worked in the office. It worked. Now I just need electricity (I am using an extension cord to one of the outlets in the living/dining room), and I'm too chicken to try to hook it up myself. But it does look really great so far. Phase 1 of the office is done. Yippee!

Friday I had a check up on my eye and things are good there too. The doctor said that my eye was still experiencing some inflammation and to keep using the drops for another week or so. That my vision might take six months to return to normal so to be patient.... like that's my strong point! Still I can't complain.... I'm just glad he didn't say there was permanent damage.

I have prepped the floor of Daughter #1's bedroom because today I will be staining her floor. I am glad it has cooled down today as for the last two days it has been obnoxiously hot. If you worked you were sweating, if you bent over you were sweating, if you breathed you were sweating. There was sweat in places I didn't think was possible to sweat. Did you know that your head could sweat??? I was glad to go shopping yesterday in the air conditioned stores just to get a break.

We went shopping yesterday because Hubby drilled holes in the new tub for the new taps (I think I might have mentioned this) in the wrong place. He boobooed big time. So now we have to cover up his mistake and that can only be done with a new set of taps or new connectors on the inside of the wall. We went into FSJ with the hopes of finding taps that would cover up the booboo, or at least see if we could possibly fix the mess in some way. We did... to the tune of $117.00. An expensive challenge I assure you. But honestly I can't fault him.... I might have done the same thing..... as a matter of a fact I probably would have done the same thing.....

Poor Hubby! He has been hard at it too.

He has the new toilet installed in the downstairs and the old toilet is soaking in vinegar outdoors (that is to remove the hard water crud). We discovered that the new/old vanity that we salvaged from someone else's bathroom renovation, and has been stored in the shed for the last year, is sitting in the back of the shed buried under twenty feet of household furniture and junk.... all the stuff we moved to the shed back in April.....!!! And so the hunt is on to move the junk out of the shed to get to our new/old vanity. It needs a paint job and so that is another job that I need to do, but I can't do it until I get the da-- thing out of the shed. Hubby will be installing the old toilet upstairs if we can get the rest of the crud removed from the old toilet.... and he will be removing the old vanity for a move to the upstairs bathroom. Hopefully E/P will be back on Monday to work on that plumbing. There will be a new wall built in the bathroom to divide the bathroom from the kitchen pantry with the new door being cut into the bathroom and the door installed at the bottom of the steps. Phew! He's getting there.... I think!


This is where the new door will go.


At least today is going to be cooler. Already it is 8 a.m. and I can sit here and not sweat to death. There is definitely a fallish look about things. I am looking out my new window to the south as I write this and the grass has a serious tinge of gold to it. The leaves have lost their fresh green look and the wild flowers that are blooming are the ones that bloom in late summer. There is a haze from distant forest fires and everything looks pinkish golden..... that's not to say that summer is over but that the summer is closing down and even the birds know it. The humming birds have not been so active and I have even seen a few flocks of warblers on the wing..... everything is preparing to head off south. Their young are hatched and raised and now the emphasis is on feeding up before they fly south. I love fall and it is my favorite time of the year....but I'll be honest.... winter scares me and fall is the harbinger of worse things to come. Why can't fall be for three full months rather than the short five weeks that it is?

Anyway the challenge today is to get floors stained without passing out in the heat, and to find the vanity in the shed. One thing is for sure.... I'm going to enjoy writing for the blog in this new office.

By The Thunderin'

Last night we had a sweet reprieve from the heat. I woke this morning around 5 a.m. to hear that the skies had opened up and sent a deluge, with thunder and lighting. It was raining very heavily. I had a look out the window and discovered that ground was giving off steam. It was needed as I watched the grass drying up and turning white over the last week as it died. This will help to replenish the green at least a little.

Not only was there rain outside but there were showers inside too. Daughter #2 was the first to get a shower in our newly hooked up ensuite shower. I was so pleased when Hubby finished everything on the upstairs shower this morning. It means that we don't have to drive to town to cool down.... no more school showers.... woo hoo!

The toilets have to be worked on today. E/P is away for the weekend and God bless him, because he did show up yesterday to help install the drains for the showers and toilets, even though he was hurting. Hubby has to hook up the water for the two new toilets today and hopefully that will mean that we can use the loo upstairs. Next week will require a new door in the downstairs bathroom as well as a new wall.... then in go the vanities both upstairs and down. A little work on the downstairs electrical to accommodate new switches and new lighting and we are done..... well sort of. That's when my work begins.... I have to paint the downstairs walls which will be an off white with a hint of peach with brown cabinets and mirror frame and trim. The towels that I just bought the other day are brown too. All of our old towels will go upstairs and they are blue. So the upstairs bathroom will probably be blue too. I can't believe that I am thinking in terms of colours for bathrooms. It is quite exciting to get that far. While I am painting the bathroom and putting on the finishing touches Hubby will go back to work in the sunroom/office/studio and start putting up the wall board. Then there is the upstairs to finish which will require stain on the floor and walls of the girls rooms and then we have to start on our room..... this, I expect will take us well into the fall. Hubby has to get the new roofing on the electrical shed and I have to paint the North deck not to mention stain the sunroom and organize furniture. Some of this can be done in the fall and will have to be done when we can. The flooring and kitchen counters will have to wait till just before Christmas I expect. So lots of work yet!

There is one last thing to let you know. My eye is definitely on the mend. The distance vision is still not great but it is coming a little bit better every day. The redness is almost gone and it no longer gunks up at night. I have an appointment tomorrow to follow up and see that there is no permanent damage. So all is well....
I'm off to have a shower.... or two.... and get really really clean.

Oh Crap!

Sometimes rotten things happen. You just have to throw up your hands and go with the flow. Lately it seems I have been on a "Rotten Thing" roller coaster ride. It just keeps going downhill.

I decided yesterday to take a trip to a nearby town.... not FSJ but a smaller town CH, where I can buy some of the things that I need which I can't get in my own small home town. This trip was not the most successful trip in the world.
I got up after a not so great night of sleep at about 4:30 a.m. where heat and nasty things on my mind kept interfering with the visit to the back of my eyelids. I decided that a day away from the sawing and cursing on plumbing pipes might be a nice reprieve. Hubby was all for it since it meant that I could pick up a few gadgets from the hardware store that had become a necessary evil. E/P showed up just before I left with one of the items that we needed and so that was one less item I had to get. That's when we discovered that Hubby had made a mistake and drilled holes in the new $1800.00 tub for Hot and Cold taps where they should not have been. This is a serious problem but we thought we would be able to overcome the problem by changing the fittings on the back of the tub. E/P is fed up with us and wants to get this job done and over with as soon as possible since he has been working on the electrical for the house and the plumbing for far longer than he thought he would. Suffice it to say that HE'S NOT HAPPY.

I dropped Daughter #2 off at Drama camp which she has been attending for the last week and a half, and Daughter #1 and I continued on our way. It was about twenty minutes into our fifty minute drive that we were attacked. We were attacked by a prehistoric gray bug the size of New York. The bark beetle was climbing up my leg and I was able to maintain my equilibrium long enough to get us to the side of the road before I jumped out of the vehicle to do the freak out dance. Meanwhile Daughter #1, who has a terror of bugs, and especially freaky bark beetles, was maintaining her equilibrium by squashing into a very small ball and threatening to jump from my speeding vehicle like a coiled spring. By the time we got off the road we had a problem....WE COULD NOT FIND THE DAMN THING!

We checked my pants and we checked the interior of the vehicle with our trusty snow scraper to beat the crap out of it, but we could not find it anywhere. So back into the truck we got and continued on our way assured that the bugger had flown off my pants when we weren't looking. Two minutes later I maintained my calm as it crawled closer to my neck up the front of my shirt by screeching to a halt in the middle of the highway. Thank God there were no other cars around. Daughter #1 maintained her calm by screaming terribly loud and threatening to jump into the lake which we had just passed. The poor bark beetle probably was as freaked out as us but we were too anxious trying to remove the bugger from my shirt without having a HEART ATTACK!

It flew off over the lake that Daughter #1 had just threatened to jump in and Daughter #1 and I breathed a sigh of relief!

When I finally got in CH, I headed straight for the hardware store. Daughter #1 was with me and we went in looking for little brass elbows in the plumbing supply section. We had an old one to use as a guide, and so I found them with very little difficulty. All was good. We bought a few more things there at the hardware store including the stain for the floor of the girls room. We left the store with our purchases and that's when I discovered my keys hanging nicely on the key chain inside the locked vehicle. GREAT!



So I called Hubby. I mean what else does a gal do? Especially when I am in another town and I don't know who does that kind of thing (break into vehicles). He basically was useless. So I went back into the store and told the girl at the cash register my dilemma and before I knew it there was a brigade of people trying to help me. It wasn't long though that I knew they were not going to be able to help. I had to call in the PROFESSIONALS.

I called an autobody place and they gave me a number of their towing service and so I called it. Finally, someone who could help me. Meanwhile the hardware brigade were hard at it trying to break into my vehicle. I have misplaced Hubby's key to the car when I came home from Olds, so I knew there was no point in going that route. ($85.00 to get a key cut for our vehicle since it requires a computer chip.) I told the hardware brigade that someone was on the way to help and they dissipated like water back into the store rather like rats jumping ship. There, Daughter #1 and I sat at 'the picnic table for sale' in the blaring down sun, waiting for our Knight in Shining Armour. He showed up in a large white duelly. (This sounds stupid even to me!) I sat there wondering how I could be so DUMB.

Half a minute... that's all.... half a minute and I was in. There was this nifty little pad that looked like a blood pressure strap that fit in between the door and the door frame and a long coat hanger-like gadget that had a yellow rubber coating to pull the handle and that was it. Now I know how to break into cars.... not that I would. It was rather wham, bam, thank you ma'am and it was all over. Well... not quite. I still had to pay him $45.00 for his half minute of work..... well I guess he deserved it... after all he was a KNIGHT.

When I got home with all of my purchases I discovered that E/P had fallen down the trap and had hurt himself badly and would likely not be back to finish the plumbing for ever.... I mean a week. While I understand E/P not wanting to come back for a while until he heals, I'm sick of stinking in this heat and having no shower to de-stink-ify. Off to the school we went for another shower. I HATE THE SCHOOL SHOWERS!

Hubby is not happy..... He hates renovations at the best of times and I can see his positive attitude dissipating daily. I will just have to smile A LOT and other things that I can't mention because his mother reads this!!!! ; }

Who Knew!

I taught the most unlikely fella how to spin last night. There's a bit of a story behind this.....

Remember the Canadian Rangers who showed up at my house for New Year's Dinner? They were half frozen and there were quite a few of them..... then remember the ill fated Exercise Western Spirit that I blogged about back in February.... well among those Rangers was the very gentlemanly CP (remember no names here).

CP came to visit this weekend. He was here in HH to teach Military CPR to Hubby and his Rangers. Of course I couldn't let the fellow come to HH and not give him a meal in our home. That would just not be very mannerly..... besides, CP is a delightful man. I met him the first time down in Valemount, when Hubby was on exercise. If I remember correctly, he drank tea in our campsite.... how can you not like that!

Last evening he came to join my family and I for dinner and a more enjoyable dinner I have not had for quite some time. We had some very intellectual conversation about everything from politics, to history, to the great outdoors, to spinning and wool. Of course being a military man we discussed uniforms which led to doeskin (red woolen fabric for you folks who don't know the lingo). CP you see was a member of the Scottish Battalion (Fort Garry Horse... I think correct me if I'm wrong CP) of the Canadian Reserves for a while before being hired by the Canadian Rangers. Hubby at one point served with the Governor General's Foot Guards. Both wore red serge-like uniforms. And so the discussion of wool began based on the nastiness of the various uniforms that are meant to look good but torture our military men. Now anyone who knows anything about wool fabric, knows that it is a very expensive product that is very difficult to get your hands on. It runs at about $120.00 a metre and itches like hell fire, leaving the wearer in warm weather with a skin rash that is just sick.... I love the stuff.

I revel in wool and woven woolen fabric is the best. There are all types of woolen fabric and while discussing wool, I began to wonder what the difference between doeskin, Melton cloth, and serge is. And so began the research... here is what I have found out:
Beaver cloth: A heavy woolen overcoating which is intended to have the appearance of natural beaver skin. The lustrous nap of short fibres is produced by milling the cloth and raising the fibres, which are cut level and laid smoothly in one direction.

Doeskin cloth: A fine woolen, warp-face cloth usually of Merino wool, milled, raised and dress-face finished. It is similar to beaver cloth but lighter and finer.

Flannel: A plain or twill weave fabric with a soft handle due to being slightly milled and raised. The cloth was originally made entirely from wool but now commonly contains some other fibre also. Both woolen and worsted fabrics are produced weighing about 200g/m2

Melton: A heavyweight fabric suitable for overcoats. Lighter weights are used as undercollars in suits. It may be entirely of wool or with a cotton warp and a woolen weft in 2/2 twill or other simple weave. It is heavily milled, raised and cropped.

Molleton: A heavy reversible woolen flannel with a nap on both faces. Now made from other fibres.

Serge: A piece-dyed 2/2 twill cloth of almost square construction with a clear surface. The twill line runs at a low angle to the weft. It is often made of wool but other fibres and blends are used.

This is the website where I found the information:

http://www.narrow-fabrics-manufacturers.com/textile-terms.html This is an excellent web resource.... I'll post it in my links....

I also found out that melton cloth is made in Melton Mowbray, England. This is what I found out here:
Melton Mowbray is home to Melton cloth (first mentioned in 1823), which is the familiar tight-woven woolen cloth which is heavily milled, and a nap raised so as to form a short, dense, non-lustrous pile. Sailors' pea coats are traditionally made of Melton cloth, the universal workmans' donkey jackets of Britain and Ireland and in North America, loggers' "cruising jackets" and Mackinaws. Doeskin cloth, a fine woolen, warp-face cloth usually of Merino wool, milled, raised and dress-face finished. It is similar to beaver cloth but lighter and finer.

Sorry I forgot to write down the website..... ooops.... this is not my work though....

Then I found this:

Since desertion was such a problem, soldiers under the rank of sergeant were not permitted to own civilian clothing. With only their uniform to wear, they would easily be spotted if they tried to desert.

Red Tunics indicate that the wearer is a member of the infantry. Soldiers were supplied with their uniforms, while officers purchased their own.

Officers' uniforms were of a much finer weave of wool, usually doeskin, while the rank and file had uniforms made of melton (wool) and to a lesser extent, serge.

http://www.royalengineers.ca/Uniforms.html

So there you have it Beaverskin cloth, Doeskin cloth, Flannel, Melton, Molleton, and Serge..... FYI.

Now back to what I started out telling you.... here is CP spinning his first yarn.



Don't you love the Harley Davidson Shirt! By the way Hubby and I drank all the beer.... ; }

I love being a spinner and a weaver....so cool!!!!! CP thanks so much for giving me the opportunity to teach you to spin..... next time I'll teach you weaving? : )

Cool Fog

This morning I woke as per normal around 4:30 a.m. and had to go visit the loo. On my way there I looked out the window and saw a lovely sight. The garden was filled with ground fog. I love ground fog.... especially early in the morning. It is so peaceful to see such a lovely sight. It is eery but lovely. It is mysterious. I took a picture last summer of just such a morning and I think it is one of the loveliest pictures I've ever seen.



I know what you are thinking.... you are probably thinking that I am nuts. I mean who likes fog? Well to be honest, even though I grew up in Newfoundland where fog abounds and lighthouses abound, where the sound of the drawn out honk of the foghorn is a normal day to day sound, it is what turned me off from fog until three years ago. When this region had a draught three years ago so bad that we didn't get a speck of rain for well on four months, everything dried up to the point where it hurt to look at things. There was so little moisture in the air that there wasn't even enough to produce dew at night. Jets would fly overhead and there would be no vapour trail behind it. That's when I learned to love fog.

Fog has a purpose. It creates an invisible amount of moisture over every living thing, and every non-living thing to come to think of it, and while that's not good when it comes to the clothes you left hanging on the clothesline overnight, it is good for all the plants that you see growing right outside your door. It also nourishes all the little insects that get their daily moisture from the dew that forms on the leaves that provide them shelter. There's a whole world that we don't see that relies heavily on the fog and mist that forms overnight. Dew is the nectar of their lives.



Now, while I love fog that brings moisture to the flowers, I do not like fog that keeps me from seeing it. Right now my eye is still coated in a thin glaze of fog. The corner of my eye is still very irritated and will take a while to clear.... if it ever does ... I just wish that fog would go away!

I Can See Clearly Now The Rain.... Tears Are Gone

I can see all obstacles in my way.... which is really good since it is a pain in the a-- to keep tripping over things. It is not entirely true that I can see clearly now, as my vision seems to be improving when I look at near things, not so much with distant things. And, oh man, do the muscles that move my eye hurt. It feels like they have been in a blinking marathon. Keeping my eye closed, seems to do it the world of good and yesterday I definitely overdid it. Waaaay toooo much eye strain! By last night I could barely open it and my whole cheek hurt. I even felt like I had a tooth ache.

Who knew that the healing of your eyes would be so complicated. Gunk I expected, redness I expected, but muscle fatigue??? I mean that's what athletes get. So here I sit with my eye closed once again. (sigh) By the way, the picture up above was taken last winter. Here is what they look like now.



I didn't get everything that I set out to do done yesterday. But well I guess I have to set my sights (no pun intended) a little lower. I did start on my tri loom piece. I definitely have to figure out a better way to hang the loom so that I can work on it more comfortably. Today I will rig up some hooks on the wall and see if that works. I also finished the book that I was reading. Probably not the smartest idea but I will dry up and blow away of boredom if I sit around and do nothing.

So there you have it..... the eye is on the mend but feels like its been working overtime. I didn't get everything done that I wanted to do but what else is new. It's the weekend and I think I'll be lenient on myself. I think I will go back to bed.... nobody else is up yet.....