Ch-ch-ch-changes...

Apparently, I've been negligent in keeping my blog posts up to date and there are some readers that rely on it for entertainment over their lunch break. Ooooh, the pressure!! And given how many things have happened last month, maybe it's time to put it online for your amusement.

There's a new president of the NRC and his entire role, best as I can figure, is to eliminate and destroy 100+ years of Canadian scientific accomplishment in the name of progress and competitiveness. Yes, I'm choosing my words carefully, for good reason, but I give the NRC 5 years (coinciding with the end of this president's term) before it's gone and the thousands of technicians and scientists are left unemployed and taking their skills elsewhere (re:out of Canada). Because that'll make Canada more competitive in science. *snort*

Anyways, off my soap box. After losing 10% of IBD's staff in the first round of cuts, I saw the writing on the wall. A position opened up at CancerCare Manitoba and I took the opportunity and decided to leave before I could get cut. In my exit interviews, I was told that it's good I'm leaving because my "unique skill set" (re: whatever it is that you do, besides look after the coffee machine) wouldn't be needed much longer. And for an institute that millions in the hole, me quitting is a heckuva lot cheaper than firing me.

I had 4 days between jobs and, as Brendon well knows, leaving me alone in the house for more than a day guarantees that something is going to be painted. And if there's something that needed painting, it's our bedroom. As Oprah hath bequeathed, so therefore it hath be true, a bedroom should be sanctuary and should only be used for two things. And one of those is sleeping ;-) The bedroom was a horrible yellow colour. It's more yellow than margarine but not really lemon yellow. It's like a faded Post-It note. Sanctuary? Nope, it's like old office supplies! *That* does not inspire that other use of a bedroom (the not sleeping one) if you're remind of being at work. Brendon started by repainting the back wall before we moved in last year. Leaving us with this.

Meh. Well, it left me unsatisfied. Nothing worse than an unsatisfied wife in the bedroom right right?? LOL! Still bland and still "faded Post-it note" yellow, but without the sponged back wall. Worse yet, the yellow wasn't evenly painted, so you could still see the roller marks and dry wall tape in some spots?! With Brendon at work, I got out my ipod, my brushes, and my painter's tape and got started.... :)

Ta DAHHHHH!!

Okay, so it's beige. Again. Like 95% of the rest of the house, it's a combination of beige and brown. Technically, it's Behr "Castle path", and that's in the grey/red category but it's a variation of beige. But it's not yellow!! So that's the bedroom finished. Well, for now... until I insist we replace the carpets, heh heh.

Meanwhile, I still had 2 more days to myself and I was out of paint. To make a long story short, this 3 yards of soil...

became this... (Brendon and I had built the flower beds and 2 boxes ahead of time)



which has grown into this...



60 square feet of boxes is now growing 2 types of tomatoes, green peppers, zucchini, beans, peas, garlic, onions, lettuce, potatoes and carrots. The flower beds are a mix of annuals (sunflowers, zinnias and celosia) and perinneals (digitalis, daisies, echinacea and a few others I can't recall their names but the red ones in the front of the picture).


Oh yeah, and I got a new car. Sexy sexy!!

One step at a time...

We called our insurance company about the water damage in the spare room and within days, we had a contractor (Rick) and an insurance adjustor at the house to inspect it. Rick brought out a hydrometer, which measures water content in materials and found that there's water in the subflooring underneath the vinyl floor of the bathroom. Most of the bathroom subfloor is damp. There isn't much moisture left in the subfloor of the bedroom so the mould that's growing there has been cut off from its food supply. So, the issue now isn't the mould in the bedroom, now it's the mould growing under the vinyl in the bathroom.
Our next step is to remove the wall between the bathroom and the bedroom to expose the plumbing, hire a plumber to locate and repair the leak. After that, Rick comes back to remov everything in the bedroom and bathroom, clean up the mould, and repair the damage. Best case scenerio, there isn't a lot of mould in the subfloor of the bathroom so it just needs to be dried, cleaned up and sealed before everything that was damaged gets replaced. Worst case scenerio, the entire bathroom is gutted right down to the joists and we get a new bathroom. We'll find out Monday just how bad it's going to be, and whether insurance will cover it.
*fingers crossed*

Dead ant, dead ant, d'd ant, d'd ant....

Speaking only for myself and not for Brendon, I'm not going to say that I regret buying the new house, just that there have been significantly more problems that need immediate repairs than we'd ever had in 5 years at the old house. We've just discovered we now have an ant infestation. We killed 10 last night and 3 more this morning. Two in the basement, most on the main floor and 2 in the upstairs. Big, nasty, ugly, black ants. We found four (killed three) as they were coming in under the baseboards next to the fridge so we used black pepper (non-toxic to Kitty) along the baseboards as a deterant but we're off to Rona again today to get ant traps.

Our biggest problem began about a month and a half ago when we thought Kitty was sick and had peed on the carpets. The stain never really vanished from the (sorta) white carpets despite my best efforts. A few weeks later, after we were recovering from the worst flu either of us had ever experienced (I threw up every 20 minutes for 8 hours, he had a 102.5°F fever), we noticed that the stain was 3x the size and had spread from the original spot by the door and was now about 2/3 the way along the carpet against the wall that divides the main bathroom from the computer room. We moved the furniture that was against the wall and found the carpets absolutely soaked. After cleaning it up (again), we tried to locate the source of the water: either from the roof or from the bathroom. Both times that we noticed the stain on the carpets was after long days of rain, which would lead me to suspect it's a roof issue. But the fixtures in the bathroom are loose and leak, so Brendon and his friends worked on the fixtures to try and seal the leaks. We won't know if the problem is fixed until we get another few days of downpour. Fortunately, we have an en suite so we don't have to use the main bathroom. If there is water in the carpets after it rains again, then we know it's a roof problem. And before you ask, no, we can't access the attic to inspect the roof because the only attic hatch is outside, above the 2nd floor and we don't have a ladder tall enough, or nerves strong enough, to climb up and inspect the roof from the inside.
Now that the carpets have been peeled back, we can see the water damage to the underpadding and subflooring. No matter what we have to fix, whether it's the bathroom or the roof, we also need to replace the floors before the mould gets worse and aggrevates our allergies.
List of things wrong with this house that need repairs:

• dining room window seal is broken and moist is between 2 panes of glass so it's foggy
• deck is unlevel (Brendon has pretty well fixed this using shims and a car jack to level it as best as he can)
• stairs from the deck to the backyard are rotten and falling apart
• ants
• furnace that can't heat the upstairs and
• a/c that can't cool the upstairs
• damaged carpets from previous owners dog
• damaged carpets from water leak
• questionable wiring in the garage that has blown out two light bulbs already

*sigh* I really liked this house.

House is sold!

We spent the entire Christmas break getting the house ready for showing, which meant taking down personal items, cleaning cleaning cleaning and repainting all the nicks and dents in the walls. We listed the house on Comfree on January 9th and the first request to see the house came the next morning while we were cleaning it. Of course, we turned down his request (he was in his truck parked in front of the house... creepy), but we got another call that night from someone who lived around the corner. He and his wife and parents came by the house and offered us over listing price. We were really excited and told him to go to a lawyer and write the offer on paper. They came back again the next day, again offering us over asking, but didn't seem to understand (despite 4 phone calls back and forth) that we wanted an offer written by a lawyer and not a personal cheque for the entire amount. He got really hostile towards us and accused us of trying to rip him off, rather than realizing that we wanted a legally binding document and not a verbal agreement. Silly us!

Every day after that, we were showing the house 3-4x per night to different people. The first and second people through on Monday came back twice to look again and bring family by for their opinions. The third couple brought an offer to purchase with a price we liked so we called back to the other people who were going to write up an offer and told them that we're going to take this offer. It was rather hard to make those calls and disappoint the other people, but we really liked this couple, liked the offer and it was more than we'd expected to make. (In hindsight, we should have listed the house for $160k or more because it would have been pretty easy to get that... oh well, hindsight's 20/20 eh?). We accepted their offer and had to wait 10 days for them to get their financing arranged with the bank. In the 10 days that we waited, we had 14 other people sign our "Call Back" list so if the financing fell through, we had other people waiting in the wings to swoop in and take our house. Sweeeeeeeet.

So their financing was approved and the house is sold after 6 days on the market. We're now packing up and getting ready for the move. Kitty's really enjoying playing in all the empty boxes and spends most of her time jumping in and out of them and investigating the growing piles of boxes in the basement.