A moving story, chapter 3: Big events

Here’s what next: more work, at home and the office! But not for long. I wasn’t even back at work for a whole week before I was fired, what! (That was April 10.) I am not lying. I basically faced one of the greatest shocks of my life, and, justifiably, I think, the following days are unclear. I had been ready to work at that job for several years to finance my new domestic lifestyle; but, admittedly, I was not challenged by the work, and it left me wanting creative activities. Anyway, I got two weeks severance and a kick in the pants to move on with things, and it meant that I could spend the next while at home working on the house, in between looking for jobs, of course. So you don’t worry too much, the day after I left Caliper, I followed a good lead, which led to an interview and a job offer a week later, and I will be starting work again next week. All told, three weeks off between jobs. I won’t even get the pleasure of collecting an EI cheque.

But back to the house. Hmm. Well, about a week after we moved in, our electricians came along to start work. I believe I mentioned something about having to rewire the entire deal. All but one room, that is, and even that room needed the ground wires connected. So for the following two weeks they roamed through the house drilling holes in the walls and leaving piles of rubble and dust in their wake. We occasionally cleaned up after them only to have them come back the next day and leave another mess. It has been difficult to say the least (for us and for them!) to live in the house as it is under renovation. And if I may offer some advice to new home buyers, it is this: if possible, try to get as much structural work done as you can before moving in. That should save you some pretty major headaches. The electricians have had to get into the attic and under the house to do their thing, and if we weren’t here to get in the way and live with the dust and debris, we would all be happier! Nonetheless, it’s almost done, and they have been very good and fast, and we didn’t really have the option of living elsewhere in the meantime.

The weekend before last was a really big one. The biggest yet I guess. Danijela’s parents came into town on Saturday to do some work and spend the night and prepare for a big work day on Sunday. Also on Saturday morning, my dad came over to rearrange the plumbing for the washer and basin sink in the basement. Of course, the electricians had shut off the power down there, so we worked by flashlight. Of course, the basement is really quite far from our minds at the moment with all the important stuff to do above ground. (But personally, I can’t wait to get building a studio there.) Also that day, I pulled out from the garden all of the metal poles and bits that previously supported a vegetable garden. A couple of days later, I would get down and dirty and remove all the cigarette butts from the soil (in one section at least). On Sunday, several of Danijela’s uncles came down along with her aunt and cousin for a housework blitz that transformed the house in hours. Most of the work was painting, and that day we almost completed the upstairs, but we also extended the heating into the back room office and installed laminate flooring in there, we tore out the basement “bedroom”, and added heating to the basement bathroom. That was all very very promising, though again, after we cleaned up, the electricians left their little piles. And aside from the weekends, progress is slow. But it goes on!

Tuesday, the 15th, my friends Jon and Graham and I began carting off the junk in Jon’s pick up. I hadn’t been inside a transfer station before, and boy was that a treat. Needless to say it stank, and we tried to get in and out of there as quickly as possible. At the same time, shovelling garbage from the back of a truck straight onto the ground did offer some satisfaction. Jon and I went again last Saturday morning only to find a line stretching down the street and around the corner, maybe 100 cars long. In the end we waited an hour and some just to get in, then another 40-odd minutes to get out! I guess the dump is a popular weekend hangout.

Danijela and I have now spent several mornings racing to IKEA to eat elevenses before they stopped serving their dollar breakfast. Well, technically, we went to shop for various bits--light fixtures, curtains, and a desk the first time; I’m not sure we bought anything the second time; and the third time, a cupboard, shelf set, and a bunch of organizing boxes--but a delicious second breakfast is certainly an incentive. And I’m sure we’ll come up with another excuse to go before I start working again. We’ve also been making numerous trips to the renovation plaza at Keele and St. Clair streets. That is, the massive plaza with a Rona, Home Depot, Canadian Tire, Dominion, Staples, a drive through ATM, and, believe me, much more. It’s handy, and I get to practice my driving. A couple of weeks ago, I went with Danijela’s dad, and we had to return in a very illegal fashion, with Mile sitting in the back on the folded-down seat with no seat belt, because there was too much stuff in the car. I only worry about this sort of thing because I’ve only got my G1 license, and the penalty is worse than just a fine I think. Whatever, right? It won’t be the last time I do something like that (sorry Mum!).

Now I can’t get our internet to work, so I have to hijack someone’s wireless. Thank goodness for those generous folk who don’t secure their connections! Read on..!

A moving story, chapter 2: Livin' the dream

Here's Danijela and Adam's house adventure after three weeks: things are a mess, but it's a mess in progress. (And I am a poet, and I don't know it.) For those who saw the house on our moving day, or soon after, you may remember a basically clean if very dated and colour-challenged house. Today there is dust everywhere, there are holes in the walls, bits of furniture everywhere, drop sheets hiding boxes, there is a TV on the floor, and one naked room awaiting insulation and drywall. But let me start where I left off.

In the first week, progress moved slowly. It took us that whole week just to get the kitchen in working order--that being the most important room for frugal people after a move. We took the highly varnished doors off of the numerous cupboards, scrubbed them with TSP, sanded down the bits of goo that wouldn't come off otherwise, then painted them all white, along with the cupboards themselves--inside and out. We soaked the hardware in TSP and found that they were actually brass, not sticky brown. (Only glazed meat products, generally found in Korean or Chinese restaurants, should ever be sticky brown.) Then we put the whole shebang back together and finally emptied our first boxes. Oh the excitement of that day! But remember that took most of a week, and that was only half of the kitchen. The other half still awaits attention.

I had begun preparing one of the upstairs rooms for painting--washing the smoke-stained walls. If you remember, they were brown from paint, but they were extra brown from various types of smoke. And I noticed something special the other day: I don't want to judge the people who previously lived here, but there are a few points that really annoy me. One in particular is that in each of the window screens on the second floor--where the daughter and son-in-law of the owner lived with two of their kids--there is a small hole cut to allow for easy cigarette ash and butt disposal. In fact, in the bathroom, they cut out half of the screen right to the edges of the frame. We found a nice pile of butts outside under that window, as well as on the front lawn and in the vegetable garden. No further comment. Anyway, Danijela and I decided to work together to get the kitchen done and to entertain each other. We actually listened to the radio for most of that week--mostly because we couldn't be bothered to dig out our CDs. Actually, we were better off then--our stereo is buried again now.

Then we were off to Montreal to surprise the young James Braithwaite and usher him into old age. I hope the attendants are treating you well at the retirement home my good friend. We had a great time there, though, as always, too short. And for the first weekend of April, there was so much snow still on the ground! I mean, there was still snow in Toronto--a lot for that time of year--but my goodness, Montreal, I hope you've recovered at last! I shouldn't talk though, Danijela and I have been past Yorkdale mall a few times recently on our way to Ikea North York (more on that later), and there are still piles of the brown stuff in the parking lots there. Anyway, the mood came down a bit on the drive home when we learned that someone had stolen our brand new barbeque from our garage. We discovered this because we had left our house key in there for Danijela's dad and uncle to come in and do some work. Some time after he found out, he called us, about four hours away, to let us know. The garage was unlocked because we had had trouble with the lock, so I suppose it was an easy target. But it is a pretty crap welcome to the neighbourhood. Still, we learned a valuable lesson--not "lock up your stuff, because your neighbours are all crooks", but "listen to your instincts": I had the idea on a couple of occasions to at least lock things up inside the garage if we couldn't lock the garage itself. So, while we will certainly warm the house this summer, I'm afraid that we will have to use a little $10 barbeque from Canadian Tire. I would still like to have a look around the neighbourhood pawn shops to see if I can find our lost beauty, but I haven't got around to it yet. The joys of home ownership!

At any rate, while we were away in la belle province, eating delicious salads and basking in the beautiful early spring weather, some big things were happening back home in the Junction. On Saturday, my dad came in to enlarge the opening between the two front rooms on our main floor. He raised the doorway about half a metre or so, and it looks great. It will look especially good once it's framed and finished. Right now, and for the past two weeks, the opening has been covered by a plastic sheet help up by duct tape. On Sunday, Danijela's dad and uncle came in and tore down the plaster and lath on the outer walls and ceiling of the main floor front room, exposing the frame of this beautiful house of ours. This created about fifteen massive bags of dust and bundles of wood, which weighed down our already sagging porch for several days. (Did I forget to mention that one corner of the porch appears to have sunk about 15-20 cm from the time it was built?)

Danijela soon heard from a friendly neighbour that we had best not catch the eye of the local building inspector, so with the help of a go-ped left behind (probably in the crawl space) we moved most of the bags around the side of the house and left them to be rained on for a couple of days. Not surprisingly, then, they got soggy. Surprisingly, though, only one of them actually broke.

What next, what next? Read on..!

A moving story, chapter 1

So, as some of you know, Danijela and I bought a house in January of this year. That gave us about two months to stew in that broth of responsibility before the sale closed on March 27. There was lots to do, of course. We knew that we would be doing an awful lot of work on the house, and we were willing. The electrical was mostly original and had to be replaced so that we could be insured (if not only for our peace of mind and convenience). The roof shingles will have to be replaced this year, the furnace soon after. There is some awful fake brick plastered on the front of the house—over the original brick, which looks in fine shape, from the few spots where the overlay has broken. That will have to go, along with the porch; the latter we'll replace in some form or another. Also, the basement is basically unfinished, and will take a couple of months of destruction and construction to create my ultimate man cave. Those were the things we knew about or were fully aware of.

It was an exciting time, those two months, and stressful, too. I began packing early in February, which created havoc in our old apartment. Of course that was inevitable with three persons living in maybe 500 square feet, with our belongings overflowing into the hallway/fire escape path shared with our downstairs neighbour. We had to transfer our utilities accounts and change all of our registered addresses. Credit cards, drivers' licenses, everything. And then dealing with the financial stuff: the mortgage and insurance, getting quotes, getting details, finalizing things, signing things, and on and on. Thank God, Danijela is amazing with this stuff. Without her, the whole process would have been a disaster. She managed somehow to keep track of everything that we had to do and when, and it all got done and nothing got lost (that we know of). If anybody wants to know more details about this stuff, feel free to ask me or Danijela.

When we got the keys, we were excited. Danijela went to visit the house with her dad right away. It was a Thursday afternoon, so I was working, but afterwards, we returned to have another look. Finally, we were in! That two months had felt like ages to me, and now, here it was, empty, silent, ours, full of potential. I could see how I wanted it to look, though I could also see the current state of it. I wanted to start right away. I couldn't wait until the weekend, and I had booked off the following week from work.

Of course, then came the surprises. The entire interior of the house needs repainting. Most of it is brown, including the ceiling in the upstairs bathroom, and most of what isn't brown is dark (blue and red), which, besides washing, will require several coats of primer and paint. The room we are planning on using as our bedroom was covered in fake wood panelling, which, once removed, revealed the original plaster, cracking and damaged and hiding a near complete lack of insulation. Elsewhere, the lighting is bad: in the upstairs bathroom, there is only one light; it's on the wall—opposite the mirror so it is effectively useless. Other rooms have equally ineffective lights, mostly failing to light anything beyond a metre-radius. A raised addition at the back of the house hid a pile of junk including nasty old shoes, a squash racquet, a broken shovel and shears, wires, soil, general garbage, and a plastic swan, which is probably the most useful thing in the pile. That same addition also lacks heating (at least it has a ceiling light).

Lest I sound like I'm just complaining, I love this house—our house. It has "great bones" and it is in a terrific "up and coming" neighbourhood, the Junction. With Spring here and warm weather on the way, I can't wait to throw open the windows and relax in the yard and clean up the lawn and maybe plant a garden (eventually—probably not this year). There's an evergreen tree right in front of the house now that we'll probably replace with something deciduous that we can watch grow. Joy. Read on..!