Lapping up luxury

I think it took about seven minutes from the move-in moment until this house started to feel like home, and I still beam each time I think about our reno. This super-insulated, draft-proofed house is cozier than anywhere I’ve ever lived before, yet the air is fresh and clean, thanks to the pumped-in fresh air from two heat recovery ventilators. I need winter slippers when I’m working in the third-floor office (because a HRV vent drizzles cool air onto my feet), but my winter sweaters are packed away and the spouse wanders around in a thin cotton top even on the days when the heating isn’t  on. The pellet stove warms the whole house, and we only switch the radiators on if we know we’re going to spending all our time in other rooms. The Bluestar stove lives up to its semi-professional promise, the bath is scarily comfortable and the cat adores the heated floors.

Here are a few of the final things we did since we moved in, the things we have outstanding and the things we haven’t quite sorted yet.

The house came with a lovely wood front door with a big oval glass window, and a less lovely inner door, with a rectangular window of ugly frosted glass. We splurged on a red-yellow-blue stained glass window to replace that, although we’ve yet to paint either door and the outside one needs some minor repairs as well.

We haven’t picked the front door color either. I’m thinking rich, dark, glossy wine red, to go with the glossy cafe au lait of the windows and the outdoor trim.

We need a new storm door. We know the one we want, but the company keeps not returning our calls so we can’t place the order.

We’re about a third of the way to the finish line on window coverings, in that we’ve ordered blinds/shutters for three rooms but done nothing about the remaining two. We probably won’t do window coverings in the sun room. Nobody can really see in there anyway, and I like the open look to the to-be-garden. But we will need something for the smallish window in the living room, where we need every lumen of light that we can get

Talking garden, we got two proposals from an expert, although I’m fretting that neither is really what I want. He suggests hostas and standard trees (something grafted onto something else), while I’m more into things that I can eat. We can’t make a final decision until we and the neighbor decide what to do about one of the trees at the back of the back yard. If it comes down, we suddenly get sun. If it stays, the garden is 99 percent shade and I can kill the fruit tree dream. We do want to move the garage door to the side, and dig up the concrete path that currently bisects the garden in a most unfriendly way.

We need to do something about the front garden too. No clue what.

The cold room is home to something like 5 dozen jars of jams, chutneys and tomatoes, which means we’ve got a lot of jam-eating to do before the 2012 jamming season starts up. It’s also storing bicycle parts, for reasons I don’t quite understand.

The panel for our solar hot water is in the garage rather than on the south-facing wall where it needs to go one day. Crazily enough, we bought a regular electric hot water tank to store the water the sun will heat even though we won’t use the electric element. There’s no market for solar hot water tanks, it seems, so this is the most cost-effective route to go.

Let’s see. What else did I forget?

Over the final hump

Right at the start of this house transformation, I admit we flirted with the idea of not doing things by the book, and sneaking our reno through without the relevant city permits as tens of thousands of homeowners probably do each year. We weren’t doing anything structural, after all, or changing the footprint of the house. But we’re both pretty law abiding individuals, so we put that thought away firmly and went through the permits and inspections and occasional irritations. The only big hiccup came when the city decided we needed a vapor barrier on top of our insulation, against the precedent of past decisions and against the advice of our architect and structural engineer. We fought, we lost and we moved on.

But why, when Canada is a single country, can we build a vanity to the detailed specs of the Quebec manufacturer, only to have the Ontario electrical inspectors reject it because the Quebecers placed the electrical outlet behind a vanity door? We had built to Quebec code, they said, but not to Ontario code, and that outlet had to go.

To cut a long story short, the outlet went, and we passed electrical muster this week, after chunks of time pulling wires through holes in foam insulation and doing the job over.

Memo to Ontario and to Quebec. Couldn’t you just get your act together, please?

We’re here a month already now, feeling settled and almost finished. Blinds will come (for most rooms) next month, and we have a red-blue-yellow stained glass window to replace the shower-stall frosted glass we inherited in the entry way. I’ll post on that once we paint the door to remove that dowdy look.

Did I ever mention how much I love this home?

Back to that bathroom

We’ve been playing tour guide a lot in the house in the two weeks since we and the boxes moved in, showing off our new-old floors and the still-gleaming kitchen.

The stove and the washing machine consistently draw favorable comments, and I’ve demonstrated the soda maker many times already. But it’s our blue-gray-white bathroom that consistently draws the oohs and ahs, which means I will indulge myself with a few more pictures, and a smug smile of satisfaction at the glories of heated bathroom floors.

The tub is the first thing you see, a gleaming white standalone number installed on the diagonal, with brushed-nickel floor-mounted taps behind it. It’s a tub built for long, leisurely bubble baths, and while I’m usually a shower type of girl, I tried it out once, and will look forward to a warm-up soak after skiing, skating or off-season biking. The Caml Tomlin web site tells me it’s a freestanding tub called Passion. I can see why.

The shower, just to the left, is spacious and surprisingly handsome, and I do love the glass accent tile. But the base is not quite level, so it doesn’t drain all the way and we have to squeegee the floor dry for now, which is a minor nuisance. But that’s the only flaw we’ve found in the bathroom or elsewhere in the house so far, and the spouse is working on a fix. The (modern, white) heated towel rail is our radiator, and the (modern, white) vanity has so much storage space that we don’t need the basket. And of course the cat loves the heated floor even more than we do. And the light saber lights look far, far better here than they ever did cramped up together in the bathroom downstairs.

All in all, a 9 out of 10 success (the shower base knocks off a point).

Here are the pictures.

Super special specialty storage

If truth be told, the cold room at the front of the basement was one of the reasons I fell in love with the shell in the first place. It was a pretty damp and dismal place before the spouse repaired the deck to stop the water leaking into it, but it was a separate, unheated room crying out to be filled with something. And it crosses over to the story that got me into blogging in the first place, a somewhat sporadic updating of the adventures and the discoveries from three years (and counting) of canning, preserving and putting things up. Making jam and chutney is something my mother used to, and I admit I never thought I would get into it in a big way. But nothing beats home made jam on a lunchtime yogurt, or home-canned tomatoes pepping up a soup, and it’s been a lot of fun. I think she would have been proud of me.

But storing the fruits of a year’s labor was always something of an issue, especially when canning buddy and I branched out beyond jams and into those tomatoes, something that needs to be done in bulk to make it worth while.

Now there’s room for everything we make, in a nice (insulated) cold room that may need an iota of heating, or perhaps a cracked-open door, to stop things freezing when the Toronto winter gets really cold. A special room, just for jam? What a concept.

And just look at all those empty shelves. The game can go on for ever.

Message to Old Man Winter: We’re ready

In one of his many previous incarnations, the spouse installed pellet stoves, boasting about the efficient way they burn up the waste wood from sawmills and places like that. So not installing something like that really wasn’t an option when we bought the shell, although space considerations meant I fought for something that fits inside the fireplace rather than a standalone unit. And while most people would spend their first days in a new home unpacking the boxes and admiring everything they did to get the house ready to receive them, he has spent large chunks of three days installing the heavy black pellet stove insert into our magnificently rebuilt fireplace.

I must admit it didn’t seem like an easy task, involving adventures on the third-floor roof to remove an old chimney liner and insert a new one. There was also a lot of drilling of metal and slicing of squares out of metal plates, as well as rooting around inside the fireplace to fix the various gizmos in place. Just as well it’s not Christmas Eve. He’d have been brained by Santa or a reindeer.

We tried it out briefly, although it’s not really cold enough for supplementary heat. There’s a whoosh rather than a crackle, but oh it’s sleek.

In other news, a neighbor and her child came round with a box of welcome cookies. A few Christmas trees, a star or two, handful of iced cats with sprinkles, and a couple of multicolored hammers. How appropriate can we get?

After all of four nights here, and major progress in reducing the number of boxes in almost every room, this already feels like home.

Bring back the booze

I started this blog with champagne when we bought our shell a million years ago or so, so it seems appropriate to celebrate our move home with a similar picture as two friends helped the spouse and I drink to the first day in the rest of our lives. The move was smooth, the movers efficient, and they didn’t scuff the new paintwork or drop the boxes. More to the point, it didn’t snow, even though this is Toronto in December (although it did rain a bit at the end).

We are surrounded by boxes, packing paper and Things That Don’t Yet Have A Home, and the internet works only with an airstick for now. But we are here, along with all the things we’ve not seen since for months. I like it. No, I love it.

We do still have work to complete, including a particularly irritating bit of remedial work after someone (not the spouse) did something distressingly wrong on the base of that picture perfect shower, and there will be more blog entries (and more pictures) to come. But this is the “we have arrived” entry.  Thank you for listening. And have a drink for us.

Me? I’m off to get a massage to  eliminate some of the mid-December stress.

Normal service will resume.

Our big splurge

I’ve been waiting for this moment ever since we spotted a super-decadent white tub in a bathroom showroom an awful lot of months ago. But as of this week we have a fully functioning bathroom. At 9 o’clock, as you enter the room, is the white-on-white vanity, at 10am the frameless glass walk-in shower, and at 1pm the magnificent tub, which is crying out for bubbles and a book. The floor-mounted taps are sleek brushed nickel, and are scarily contemporary, and to our surprise there actually is room to clean behind it, which was useful as I scooped up layers of dust today. It’s a feature, it’s a splurge and it looks just great.

Of course I’m now pining for accessories for the clutter that’s bound to come as soon as we move in, given that both tub and shower have nowhere to hide so much as a bar of soap. we probably need a storage thingymajig that stands behind the tub, and a shelf of some sort in the shower area.

Details. Not until after we move.

Talking of moving, extra boxes are filling up, not to mention the ones we never unpacked in our eight months in temporary digs. We more or less cleared the basement today, and eliminated the last mounds of clutter from the kitchen countertop, exposing a gleaming black-grey quartz with sparkles of sapphire blue.

In a symbolic gesture, I unpacked my first purchase, a countertop soda stream that is supposed to eliminate the need to keep racing down to the store for more fizzy water. Toronto tap water never tasted quite so good.

What idiot designed a gizmo (pictured below the space for the microwave) that’s just an inch too tall to fit under a regular kitchen countertop?