Journey & Adventure

I love bright colors. I like being welcomed by the feeling of warmth and cheerfulness when I enter a room. As much as the houses in Architectural Digest are stunning to look at, I don’t think they are meant to be lived in – at least not by me. I understand that some of the first rules when selling a house is to depersonalize it, remove clutter and keep wall colors neutral. This allows people to see beyond the knick-knacks and color on the walls and picture what their stuff could look like within the rooms. Here’s my dilemma – in my opinion, neutral colors can be too sterile, impersonal and boring. I’m not saying I intend on keeping the orange walls in The Boy’s bathroom or the fire engine red paint in his bedroom, but I need to find a compromise that will work for us until we sell the house, but I would like to do it now while J is still willing to have me as his “boss”. We are 98% done the spare room and have finished painting it and in case you’re wondering about the color, we ...

By the end of this week, we will be pretty darn close to checking two major items off of our “house to-do” list.     The major work on the spare room is almost complete.   We still have to paint, install closet doors, light fixtures and new carpet, but in my opinion those are minor items compared to gutting, wiring, dry-walling, mudding and sanding.   The other major item almost accomplished this week has been the removal of 4 very old pine trees from our side yard.   The trees have been there a long time and were quite large; however because of their age, they had started to die from the bottom up and had become a very large eyesore.     Knowing I would be losing my privacy once those trees were removed has caused me a great deal of anxiety this week because our back yard is now visible from the road that runs alongside our house. *sigh*     Here are some before and after pictures.   There’s still a lot of cl...

Well, my long weekend did not go as originally planned. Actually, all my plans pretty much went out the window the moment I threw my back out first thing on Saturday morning. Apart from turning the wrong way, I can’t explain why it happened, but it did and the rest of my weekend was spent between lying on the floor, lying on the sofa, lying in bed, crawling up the stairs and pretty much being miserable. In hindsight, although we didn’t get much done with our projects, or get to the movies or to the beach, we did get some much needed rest and caught up on some mindless television watching, so all in all, I guess it was somewhat successful. Our weather here in Canada has been fantastic – far better than it usually is this time of year. On the downside, we are already experiencing dry, drought–like conditions. Our grass has turned a beautiful shade of brown and the farmer’s fields are quickly becoming dust-bowls. I don’t want to say it, but we need rain. It can rain as much as it w...