Not dead yet

Oh hi!  Sorry about that.  February seems to be catching.  Although it's been gorgeous here this week, (Canadian) summer temperatures and sunny.  We've been busy getting odds and ends of moving and general living done lately - looking into doctors/vet/taxes etc. plus yard work and renovations.  I generally feel like I've been run over by a bus at the end of the day.  I couldn't imagine doing all this plus taking care of kids.

So.  New house.  Well, slightly used, new to us.  Unfortunately, the previous owners weren't too keen on doing much cleaning or maintenance.  Just think of it as projects!  Or a bunch more work than we were expecting.  None of it should be super expensive, just a lot of elbow grease and putting up with shabbiness that could have been avoided with a bit of regular TLC.  Le sigh.  Oh well, such is life.  Jay has already put in central vac and an RO system, both of which are awesome.  Turns out that the water here is pretty swampy, so the filtering is lovely.

We also bought a new bed which we now have to return part of.  Thanks, sales lady, for ordering us the wrong boxspring!  And taking an hour to do it incorrectly, over and over!  Did I mention how much it annoys me when people don't do their job competently?  I'm a horrible person.  But at least my mattress is super comfy.

So, yard work.  Our back yard is pretty much a clean slate:

And by clean slate, I mean it's rather bare.  There's a cheap metal shed, whose doors don't close so much as fall over, with a rotting base full of the previous owners' junk and mouse turds.  And there's grass, with some slanty bits here and there.  There was also a rotting fence that was about to come down on someone's head - someone in the next yard, that is.  Jay put some not-so-pretty yet non-lawsuity stakes and boards in to mitigate the problem, at least until we have time/money to devote to getting the fence replaced.

I put in a couple trees - a fig, a peach, and a pear.  They were on sale, which was awesome.  I'm all over cheap plants that are in good shape.

Also, did I mention that tree planting time?  In February?  We went to run some errands tonight and it was 21 degrees Celsius at 8 at night.  I'm okay with this warm winter thing.

So I meant to take some pictures of the house but it's not very light before leaving for work, and it gets dark pretty early after getting home/making supper, so it'll happen this weekend.  Zhere, zhere.

Update: more pictures.

entrance and stairs with painting from Cuba

kitchen-dining-living room

master bedroom

upstairs living room

 

There's also a couple other bedrooms that aren't particularly pretty/free of clutter so I didn't take any pictures.  They're pretty basic, one has our spare bed and the other has the treadmill and elliptical trainer - just try to imagine them.  This is the wall in the one we painted, with Roly "helping" (also known as climbing the ladder while I was standing on it which scared the furry heck out of me, and then cuddling with the ladder).  The wall colour is fairly dark, but I like it, and it goes nicely with the white trim. 

 There's also the pretty fish we got.  I found this wall mountable fish bowl, which means the cats can't terrorize the fish to death.  This Fishy seems much less timid than our last one, so I'm not sure he would have been terrorized anyways.  He's made a lot of bubbles around the top of the water, so evidently he likes us.  Shiny!