Moving In and a Few Renovations

Well, it's almost three full weeks into 2008 so I suppose I should start off by saying "Happy New Year".

A lot has happened since my last post back in November, most importantly, we moved into our new house. It's really nice having our own place. There is a sense of freedom that I've never felt before in rental places. There's no recurring house inspections by the real estate company to make sure I'm not trashing the place. I don't have to worry about putting holes in the wall when I want to hang a picture. If I want to put a hole in the wall, I'm going to put a hole in the wall, damn it.

To date, we've already done a few things to the house. Before we moved in, the paint on the ceilings was flaking off. So, we had some of them painted and they look a thousand times better. Then, we decided to get some security screens installed. We got a security door installed in the back of the house and some Crimsafe window screens installed.

During the two week break we had in December/January, we decided to do some painting of our own. The sleep-out section of our house was in desperate need of painting. Some of the walls had flaking paint, one wall was painted a horrible deep red and another wall had really bad wallpaper that was peeling off. Liz and I spent several days painting the two rooms. The hardest part was all the preparation work. We scraped all the flaking paint, filled in any cracks or holes, then sanded all the walls, then washed them, then primed them. After that, we were able to apply two coats of paint. The prep work was well worth it though because the walls look great now. Incidentally, we ended up painting the walls almost the exact same colour that they were before (a sort of beige colour called "Putty"). We didn't realise this when we bought the paint, it just kind of happened. We also painted the windows and I took that opportunity to replace all the hardware on them (except the hinges). I replaced all the latches (called "spur catches") and, today, I finished installing the window stays. Below are some photos of the new window hardware:

Window Stay


Window Stay


Spur Catch


This weekend, we also hung up some curtains in the bedrooms. Future projects include painting the outside of the house, getting a water tank, renovating the bathroom and kitchen, possibly building a deck in the backyard, and knocking down the chicken coop.

I'll keep you posted on all of that in the future.