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?

When the cat’s away

The spouse was away for a couple of days this week, which gave me a chance to uncover a few more things, if only to prove to myself that we actually will move in one day. I washed windows, scrubbed floors, dusted walls and wiped down our gleaming countertop.

And I sat back and beamed at how wonderful it looks.

Of course things are still distressingly different when I look in the other direction.

One day we’ll get there, right?

Fine and fabulous floors

It’s been a while since we saw the floors to the house, so it was a special moment today when I peeled the protective paper away from three rooms (saving it for the recycling of course) and revealed our refinished woodwork in its full, chestnut-colored glory. When we got the house, the floors were chipped and stained and battered, and we admitted to a little nervousness at refinishing rather than buying new. But  they look spectacular, not to mention the greenie points we’re claiming from keeping rather than buying.

I did manage to sneak in a couple of micro scratches in an overenthusiastic attempt to vacuum up the dust, but I’m hoping there’s a way to make them less noticeable. Anyone got tips for getting micro scratches out of old but newly finished floors?

Elsewhere, the stairs have their first hint of the Oreo cookie look, and the mantle is painted and the brickwork is all sliced up ready to receive the pellet stove insert. The plumber might come tonight. I hope so. I want to see the tub in the right place and work out if it looks as good in real life as it did in the showroom.

And now that we’ve survived the reno, I think it’s time to post a picture of the birthday gift I bought the spouse this year, paying far too much for a copy of a New Yorker cartoon and then paying again to have it hard-mounted ready for hanging in the powder room.

We never really had a deadline, and the budget was sort of fuzzy.

But I think we won.

Things are heating up

Who would think I could get so excited about heating? But our cast iron radiators are works of art in their own right, and suddenly have star billing in our almost-home. We bought them at the very start of the reno, and got them sand-blasted, sprayed a color called metallic champagne, and occasionally resized because one of them was hopelessly overpowered for our space. Last week they made it to the various rooms, and now they are installed, tested and even warm, although we switched them off at night to stop the superinsulated house from turning into a sauna.

Pictures speak louder than words on this one. Here is the collection, including the (modern) heated towel rail for the (modern) almost-finished bathroom.

The thought of a toasty warm towel after a bath or shower is almost as appealing as the thought of toasty warm feet from the in-floor heating there.

Any feedback?

Toward the finish line

Three visits to the house this week, and each time I notice the changes as we race toward a move-in finish line that’s less than two weeks away. We had a shell for months, in varying degrees of disrepair, then a house, with varying degrees of color and character. Every day now we’re getting closer to that home.

I admit that bringing the bike to its temporary accommodation was a big mental step in the process, but we’ve moved way beyond that now. Suddenly we’re getting another look at those things we’d almost forgotten that we bought, and luckily for us, we still like them.

Taps first, and the brushed nickel for bathroom and kitchen looks seriously classy, although I worry that the faucet in the powder room will splash water beyond the pocket-handkerchief sink. I love the look of the bathroom. I hate the thought that 30 years from how we’ll sell the house and someone will look at it and dismiss our bathroom fixtures, just like we dismissed the walk-in shower and step up jacuzzi tub that came with the house.

Next stage is the glass enclosure for the shower, which the experts started installing today, only to break off because a crucial part was missing.

The tub, freed of its cardboard but still encased in plastic, is now in the correct room, albeit at the wrong angle and in the wrong part of the part of the room, and the refinished radiators are in place too, after an adventurous day lugging them up the stairs. The spouse says it’s the hardest day of work he’s had since we started the reno, including the heavy-duty demolition days right at the start. Those radiators weigh several hundred pounds apiece, and we have a lot of distressingly narrow stairs.

The radiator collection includes this cute number underneath the living room window. When we started the heating adventure back in the spring, it looked like this.

And while we have no furniture in the house right now (I ate lunch sitting on the sun room’s heated floor), fridge, stove and dishwasher are installed and ready to roll.

There’s a minor snafu here, of course, and one of the drawers for the fridge arrived with a bad crack. Lowes, where we bought the fridge in May, has moved on from this model in favor of a smaller one. Nice salesman emailed supplier to see what can be done.

But we can, for the first time, make ice for our martinis and heat up our pizzas. Who will be the first to join us?

Home is where the bike is

I took one of the bikes down to the house this weekend because it was one of those rare November days when you can actually get out on a bike without losing a few fingers and toes to frostbite in the process. And rather than taking it back uptown to the temporary digs, I decided to leave it there, in a sign that this place really will be home one day. I didn’t want to leave it in the basement, because there are still several layers of dust on everything, and I didn’t want to leave it in the garage, because this was my first road bike, and I’m still rather fond of it. What if someone breaks into the garage and walks away with it?

But one of the selling factors of this house for me was the fact that there’s a ready-made cold room under the deck for all the jams and chutneys I make when I’m not fretting about renovating a house. Right now, it’s home to the tiles we didn’t use, and to a shelf full of junk of some shape, size or color. And as of yesterday, it’s also home to the bike, one of my five pairs of bike shoes and a helmet, just in case.

I did say this place was starting to feel like home.