One Year

We bought Halloween costumes today. I gave in and addressed my illusions that I would have time to make them this year, and let the kids enjoy the morning perusing the costume aisle. Sometimes, the best way to do the to-do list is to just delete items from it.
 
It was almost a year ago now that we moved into this house. We had celebrated Halloween as super heroes, having put in a couple months of do-it-ourselves work on the house. Troy spent his days on the house, and we would return again for a late night of renos after the kids were tucked in at my parents. We felt quite in the clear with our youngest a year old, our baby days behind us, a whirlwind of renovations ahead of us. We moved in admist the reno chaos in early November, and within weeks realized we were expecting again.


Troy and I, the caped defenders of 2009, unaware of the crazy 2010 had in store for us!

My cute little Wolverine and Robin.

Some days it feels like we've bitten off too much, like we can't possibly do it all, that we must be crazy. But indulge me, let me list what we HAVE done over this past year.

• Upon buying our house, we had a moat dug around it and replaced two of the basement walls, original old three feet thick stone walls, that were on their way to caving in.
• We also had a basement floor insulated and poured, where there was once only a dirt floor.
• We revived the buried basement door and the wood furnace, to heat our home with wood instead of oil. (A cost savings and feature I love now, the rythym of heating our home with a fire is peaceful. After last year though, hiring someone to cut our wood was high on my priority list this year).
• We replaced the leaking roof and cleaned out and reinsulated the attic. Craziest job ever. Have you ever examined a bat skeleton? I have. As creeped out as I was, I actually considered bringing it down to show the boys, because I knew they would be uber impressed. Instead though, I promptly vacuumed it into the shop vac.
• We gutted the entire top floor, three bedrooms, insulated, drywalled, painted, rewired, and refloored. Someday, we might even get the mouldings on. A job that seems it may never come to fruition.
• We added closets to the boys room. The outsides of which are yet to be finished.
• We did the same to our lower floor bedroom. And added an awesome master closet under the stairs, lined in delicious fragrant cedar.
• There was an outdoor pump house that was replumbed to be indoors, and the scary child-trap house dug out and filled in. Can you tell it worried me slightly?
• Much dug up lawn was raked, rock picked and seeded, although there's oh-so-much to go. This is a task that has been so overlooked in the midst of a very pregnant / newborn baby summer while I wasn't up to it and Troy was needed elsewhere.
• New heating and new plumbing has been done, as well as the piping for central vac that will eventually be installed.
• There was a second washroom added in the laundry, and the laundry room rearranged to make more sense.
• Troy built fabulous basement storage shelves for all things toted. Christmas decorations, camping and sports gear, kids clothes out of cycle. 
• A dishwasher was added, thank God, and a garburator as well, two things I missed so much.
• We also cut a hole in the wall to recess our refridgerator. To say our modern gigantaur fridge didn't fit before doing so is an understatement.
• We've un-wallpapered a third of the rooms we aren't gutting, in preparation to paint. The paint is bought, the new flooring is bought, now just to do it sometime the inspiration strikes me!
• Most recently, Troy and my father replaced our half-broken dining room sliding doors with larger, more beautiful garden doors.
• Along the way, I've unpacked and purged, unpacked and organized, and unpacked and purged some more. We've fought with critters (I think the house is mostly only inhabited by us now), and piece by piece we've carved out space to live and play in.

It sounds as though we might as well have built new, but that's not the case. I love this house. But I did know we'd have lots to do to it.


Before.

During.





   

Almost there.

  

Before.

Workin' hard.

 So close!

Before.

 De-rugged, not renovated, but definitely well-loved!

Our room, well in progress, just weeks before Maxwell's arrival.

 Done in time!

 New floors and all.

Not yet finished, but perfectly loveable.

 Areas undone, but carved out to live in.

 Lots of wallpaper and rug to remove. Next up!

I should do a 'Have Done' list more often, it feels great! Much better than looking over the 'To Do' list. I'm so excited to see what manifests in the next year.