BarbHaley.com

?What can I say?
It’s been a wee bit of a whirlwind around here since the new year.
When I get you all caught up – you’ll understand why I haven’t been updating in a long while…..

First bit of news:

It’s true!!!
That’s Baby Smoke in there. Future Mountain Biker!
Yes, I know…it’s a picture that only a mother can love because the baby is so tiny. It’s about the size of the fingernail on your pinky finger! The baby is 6.5 weeks here and it was taken on Dec 14th.
No doubt that there will be a new blog coming soon – heehee!
So there is reason #1 for why I haven’t been keeping up with the blogging. The first trimester was good in that I never had any morning sickness, only nausea if I didn’t eat when I was hungry, but I was extremely tired. I was all I could do to get through the day, get home, nap, have dinner (made for me!) and then go to bed.

Then Christmas was right there. We broke the news to the whole family at Christmas dinner. I think Grandma & Grandpa got the best present!

We run in the New Year with our septic system backing up all over the basement.
Joy!

Ground Zero:

Yes, that is POO. And it happened on a Sunday, so now what?

We had our tank cleaned in July so that wasnt’ the problem. It could have been the septic field but thankfully it was just because there was a blockage int he line on the way to the tank. Simple fix but a huge mess.

The other good thing was that I had the right insurance coverage. The insurance company had a restoration company come in first thing on Monday who ripped out everything they found that was contaminated. Later they treated the stuff that can’t come out ie: concrete floor. Now we paly the waiting game for getting the estimates in from various contractors……It seemed to take forever!

This is the bottom of the stairs:

In the spare bedroom:

The other bedroom downstairs:

What’s left of the downstairs bathroom:

What used to be the downstairs kitchenette:

You will note (especially if you have been to our house) that a trip downstairs also involves a time warp to the 1970′s.
Note in some of the pictures that you can still see some of the best of the 70′s; the lovely wood panelling available in our basement in about 5 flavors, the harvest gold & avocado green linoleum which also used to have a harvest gold shag (yes shag!) carpet thrown on top. Sad to say that the carpet is now residing at the local garbage dump.

Which brings me to our insurance options, now that we finally got the estimates in.
1. The Restoration company comes in a puts everything back as close to original as possible.
2. We take the insurance cheque and do it ourselves.
3. We find a contractor to do the work we want and have the cheque made out to me and the
contractor.

Option #1 was out….who’d want that basement the way it once was???
Option #2 is ok…but we needed some help

So it’s option #3. But who can we get to come in to do the changes we want, that we could afford because no doubt that the changes that we want would be over the amount on the insurance cheque.
It just so happens that a good buddy of ours from North Vancouver IS a contractor, just so happens to also be storing his boat in our car-hole for the last year for free. The best news, D’Arcy was available right away! What luck.

In the meantime, Johnny & I completely gutted the downstairs to stud and decided what we wanted to change.

The Boys got to work on a Friday and were done (all drywall up) by early tues afternoon! Amazing! We even had another good friend come in from Kamloops for a couple days of electrical work.
So, basically, we moved a couple doors and walls, removed a wall/door, redid all the electrical (the previous work was a fire hazard and definitely NOT up to code) got the hot tub wired in (finally), totally insulated the ceiling, brand new corner shower unit, new vanity, new toilet, took out the baseboard heater and replaced it with a heated slate floor (bathroom only), a light maple laminate floor through out the rest of the downstairs, all new doors, new plumbing, new lighting, new stove, and newly refinished kitchen cabinetry.

We had to wait a little bit for the drywall finishing guy to have time to complete the drywall work and then JOhnny had to work out of town with Bjorn of the Kranked MTB films series. Johnny ened up out of town for almost 3 weeks so that left a lot of work for me to do.
Dad helped me a bit with the painting, and once that was out of the way I started the other projects:

The start of how the kitchen will look:

Finished the painting:

Here’s where I started laying the laminate flooring (spare bedroom):

Here I am working my way from the kitchen to the rec room:

All DONE!

Looking from the spare bedroom to the rec room:

and into the rec room kitchen:

finished floor in the spare bedroom and the door is up:

Finshed flooring and door up the the rec room:

All that crawling around on my knees, 5 months pregnant wasn’t a pretty sight and now I am sporting huge calouses on my knees (even though I wore knee pads)!

Almost done bathroom. I had to rip the rough cut lumber from a 6″ width down to 3″ for all the trim work I put up. I put the toilet in (with brand new guts) all by myself and I installed the vanity plumbing included! Still waiting for a custom shower door to arrive and be installed. Check out the bitchin’ slate floor!!
Now I want the same for my bathroom upstairs….

The cool trim work in the spare bedroom:

Kitchenette coming together slowly, and the finished trim work:

That’s it for now…..Now it’s just the nit picken finishing details that take forever.
There will be another post of the reno when it is all done…so stay tuned.

So – now do you understand why I haven’t been updating in a long while.
Just lucky that I am hideously sick with a head cold (which I can take nothing for) that I am taking the day off from work, taking it easy that I am taking the time to catch up finally…..

More later!

I’m out.