we have a new pantry…oh, and a new baby

Yes, it’s been quiet for a while on the blogging front.  Surprisingly, having a newborn is not really conducive to spending hours naval gazing about your renovation. I know – shocking!

Some people manage it, but I have no idea how (see Young House Love for folks we love to hate – their weekly photo project of their daughter is damn cute, but as I could barely dress myself during my first month of motherhood, such things were beyond me).  I had to wait a while as this blog was in grave danger of becoming about parenting as looking after a newborn actually does take up EVERY minute of your day, and thus is pretty much all you think about.  But frankly, I spend enough time now obsessing about being  a mom on Facebook, email and in ‘real’ life, that I don’t need to write about it here too.  Plus, the hilarious Amy Morrison at Pregnant Chicken has that shit covered.

But without further ado, here’s what we made:

Ok, she’s not always so red and angry (not always…), but she does have, let’s call it ‘personality’.  Here she is looking more angelic:

Her name is Finley Rose, though we usually just call her Fin (or the monster/poo machine/peanut, depending on the day).  Yep, she came out with a shock of red hair, and without much drama (though she does drama quite well now thank you).  But she’s pretty much amazing and awesome.
We did good.

So…back to the house.  It’s been easy to forget sometimes that we live in a glorified crack house, but there’s nothing like family visiting to remind you of all the projects that are still ‘in progress’.  I feel like I spent weeks constantly apologizing and explaining – ‘oh right, that shouldn’t really be there’ and ‘yes, that’s supposed to be painted/fixed/less dangerous/not a hole’.  It’s amazing what you learn to live with and then just forget about.  Whoops.  My mom and my two sisters were here (My dad declined: ‘why would I want to go to Halifax in February?’  Why indeed.  And my brother also stayed home, ’cause brothers are like that.), and as Fin was almost 2 weeks late – cue feeling unbelievably sorry for myself and other pregnant dramatics (idiot, someone should have told me it only gets harder) – my family and I had a lot of time to discuss what still needs to be done to the house.

My mom, always one for a project, took on the pantry at my request.  She has a thing for pantries (we’ve never had a house without one, which in North America, is something of an accomplishment), and ours didn’t really look much better than when we first moved in:

Ok, it looked a bit better, but I don’t have any photos.  The walls had been painted, but not the ceiling, and the floor was still the same, as were the gross shelves.

Cue supermom.  She’ll hate me for doing this, but here she is installing floor tiles to match the rest of the kitchen (I think she looks cute, but she’ll be horrified she’s ‘on the internet’):

She painted the ceiling, put up new shelves, reorganized everything (or I should say organized – there was no ‘re’ about it as it had just been a dumping ground), and even bought me a new broom and hooks to hang it on.  Actually, they all made me buy a new broom as mine was deemed ‘dickish’ – though I had bought it at a home show from a guy giving a demo with a headset (when are they ever wrong?) and thought it was the bee’s knees…

So here’s the pantry progression:

Before

During

After!

Hurray!  It’s not gross anymore, and now there’s actually room to put stuff.  Even the random crate of tools we’re too lazy to keep in the basement has a place (though why we need a saw in there I’m not quite sure).  I even have somewhere to put non-kitchen stuff, like rolled paper and canvas, bottles, and diapers, which is great, as there is only one closet in this entire apartment, which, as you might expect, is full.

There’s also room for the vacuum that I desperately need.  I know, I know, I don’t own a vacuum. Don’t judge – it’s a long story involving wet dog smell and carpet that I SWEAR crept into the vacuum I had so I had to get rid of it, even though, yes, no one but me could smell it.  Anyway, now I live in a house that smells like dirty diapers so I guess the last laugh’s on me.

So it’s not quite finished – my mom will kill me for posting photos without the final shelf up (there’s a small one for spices and it still bugs her that she left without having time to put it up – hmm, guess where I get my obsessive personality?), and she wants us to round the edge of that wooden counter top as she says it looks ‘stupid’ as it is beside the window -  but really, if I waited to post this until it was totally finished we might be waiting another 4 months…

It may not be a design marvel (despite the poster of cheese varieties I recently re-discovered and put up – I know, check me out!), but it works.  There’s even some lovely mom touches that I only noticed after she’d gone:

Labelled!
Thanks mom, you’re the best.  I should have a kid every year – just imagine how much you could accomplish!
Ok…no.

A Nursery in 36 Sq Ft – The Final Countdown

So we’re about to get this show on the road.  Yep, baby times are ahead.  9 days and counting…

Which is why it’s probably a good thing that we actually got the nursery finished.  Finally.  And sort of.

Cue our new theme song:

‘We’re heading to Venus’ folks.
Maybe we should play this in the delivery room?  Hmmmm…
We can embarrass this kid before it even comes out of the womb.

But compared with my panic back in November, I have calmed down somewhat.  In my now 38 weeks of pregnancy wisdom, here’s what I have learned from friends and strangers (or just stubbornly decided myself) are the only things necessary for a nursery:

1. A place to store all the baby crap – drawers seem to suffice.  Even if you buy your child nothing to wear, he/she will soon have more clothes than you thanks to all the gifts and hand me downs you’ll receive.

2. A place for the baby to sleep.

And actually, as the baby is supposed to sleep in your room for the first 6 months (yep, guess who finally dragged her ass to a parenting class?), the nursery need only be a glorified closet for the first little bit.

But, and it’s a big but, the other thing I’ve learned is that none of this means dick when you’re pregnant, hormonal, and nesting.

No.  You want THE NURSERY.  I think it’s just totally psychological (and cultural).  I was having a complete hyperventilating meltdown about the state of our nursery (really wish I was exaggerating here, but yes, the lack of ‘nursery-ness’ really made breathing difficult occasionally), that only went away when Sam came home with a pine chest of drawers.

Antique Nova Scotian pine no less – though missing the part of the bottom apron, which made it affordable for us, so I’m not complaining. (And whoops, you can also see some evidence of my failed painted floor experiment – one day we’ll put some proper flooring down.  One day.  Oh, and put the heater pieces back on too.)

Turns out all I actually needed was to take the baby stuff out of the bags in the closet (some of it had been given to me around 6 months ago when, to be honest, it just freaked me out), fold it all, put it in drawers, and all was well with the world.  Who knew?

As you might remember, this is what the office/nursery/dumping ground looked like before:

And here it is now:

Now, let me come clean and say this is a bit fake.  The crib (it’s a travel crib – small and on sale, so perfect) will be going beside our bed.  The chair – the BEST baby shower gift from our amazing group of friends who obviously know us well (though I also need to show you guys the sexy stroller our other friends sent us – yes, sexy and stroller in the same sentence…) – will also be moving, into the living room, or maybe our bedroom if I can get it to fit.  The only thing actually staying in the room right now is the chest of drawers.  We bought it as the height means it can double as a change table, but from what everyone tells me, we’ll probably end up using a changing pad on the floor or the bed.  Truth be told, I only put the change pad on the dresser for the pictures so no one thinks I’m a bad mom-to-be who doesn’t even have a place to change her kid’s diapers…

So there you go – a basic gender-neutral nursery (yep, still don’t know what’s going to come out) in 6 x 6 ft.  It is possible.

The other side of the room has our long desk that Sam built in December – one side for me with a variety of egg-related art and studio ephemera, and the other for Sam’s accounting textbooks and place to study.  It’s organized and working (finally), but it’s too stressful to try and take pictures of that right now.  I want it to look good, and right now it really doesn’t.  I need some drawers and containers to make it look less cluttered, but that will have to wait.  So just imagine for now that it looks amazing and I’m some kind of Wonder Woman.
Did I mention I’m having a baby in 9 days?

But for the next month at least, the nursery/study will be a room for my mom.  Who arrives tomorrow.  Which means I should probably get off my pregnant ass, stop farting around taking fake nursery photos, and inflate a bed so she has somewhere to sleep.

One more time…

new year, new beginnings, new adventure – but a hold on renovating

Yep, renovating is going to take a hiatus for a month (well, depending on whether or not Sam continues his ‘getting ready for baby’ whirlwind, but don’t hold your breath for any updates from him here!) while I head off to Ross Creek Centre for the Arts in Canning, Nova Scotia for a 4 week art residency.

I leave tomorrow, and in order to keep myself motivated, I’m starting a new blog:

aworkofarteveryday.wordpress

- where, yes, I will be creating and posting a work of art every day for the next 4 weeks.

Enjoy!

(image from http://www.artscentre.ca/about-us/staff-and-board/)

’tis the season for getting sh*t done…

…or, ‘in awe of the male nesting instinct…’

So…wow.  You ever live with someone for nearly 10 years and then they go and do something – or a series of things – that totally blows your mind?  Yeah, well, turns out I’ve been living with a secret carpentry/renovating genius all these years and had NO IDEA.  Until now.  Not that he didn’t do a lot before, but nothing like this (and with remarkably little swearing).

To re-cap, in the past 3 days, Sam has:

1. built shelves in the living room for the record collection

2. built a desk in the study/nursery

3. added two new storage shelves in the study/nursery (- what the hell are we going to call this room?)

4. finished the trim in the bathroom

5. installed all the quarter round and moldings for the hallway baseboards

6. installed new light fixtures

7. replaced all the thresholds on all the doorways

8. cut all the doors to fit the thresholds

…and a million other small things that have been bugging the shit out of me since the summer.

Here’s the pile of records you might remember:

And, voila (which is what it felt like – I think I maybe had time to go to the corner store and they were done)
- here’s the new shelves:

 

Bathroom trim and other improvements:

- which might not look like the biggest deal, but remember what we had to cover up here after the tiling was ‘done’:

It required either an entire new row of tiles to cover all that crap at the top, or a very WIDE piece of trim.  We chose trim – and I no longer feel I need to pee with my eyes closed.

And really, how did I live with that light fixture for so long?  Gross.  We’ve had this $5 bargain from Walmart ready to install for about 4 months now…

New medicine cabinet is on hold (oh, and Sam built new shelves for that too – I’m telling you, he is on FIRE).

But why are there not pictures of everything Sam accomplished?  Because he’s too damn fast, that’s why.  By the time I get my lazy ass in gear and waddle over to take a ‘before’ picture, it’s already been transformed into an ‘after’.  Oh, and in the case of the study/nursery I still need to organize things so the photos do the new desk justice – we are almost there (as in the room no longer looks like a craptastic dumping ground), and I have recovered from my nursery panic/frenzy – hence building of desk and not change table, though it could be both.

Sam is like a man possessed.  Let no one tell you it is just women who get the nesting instinct.  Oh no…I’m too busy feeling fat and eating candy on the couch for that (especially now the gestational diabetes test came back negative – horray!  candy for everyone!).

Give a man about to be a dad a saw and a nail gun and magical things can happen…

how to not plan a nursery – probably

Ok, brace yourselves, because this is what the future home of baby Butler/Parent currently looks like:

I know – yikes.

We put these shelves up thinking that would solve the storage problem.

Not exactly.

Where the hell did all this stuff come from?

I like to think I’m pretty good at weeding stuff out, tossing things – i.e., not being a hoarder (moving every few years certainly helps), but I’m at a loss for what to do with all this.  It’s a combination of not having a studio space at home (well, this was, uh, supposed to be it), so we have cameras, slide projectors, sketch books and related art paraphernalia, mixed with a former career in the auction biz (that might become relevant again – more on that later), meaning auction catalogues and reference books out the ying yang, and topped off with all Sam’s former music college recording stuff, current music making stuff, and now including everything for the studious accounting student.  Phew.   Oh, and we discovered everything in the basement gets mouldy so some stuff had to be relocated up here.

I guess it was obvious from this list that 2 measly shelves wasn’t going to cut it.

And now we have to fit baby in here too, and of course I want it to look super sexy. Well, ok, not sexy, like I want a sexy baby (weird), but I want a great looking space.  Actually, at this point I would settle for one that wasn’t a crap-tastic dumping ground and could make way for, I don’t know – a dresser, maybe a crib.  Obviously a change table would be asking too much.

Unfortunately, baby furniture appears to be a minefield of pure awfulness.  Check out this little gem that popped up when I innocently put the word ‘crib’ into Amazon:

Wow.  And only $7,932.50.

But apart from decor/taste issues, the simple issue of size is something I can’t get my head around.  How can something so small need so much stuff?  And why is it all so huge?  Someone on-line (can’t find where I read this unfortunately) lamented the fact that many children’s cribs are the size of a small hatchback.  Too true.  And we don’t have room to park a bike in there, never mind a vehicle-sized bed for a tiny infant (well, I’m hoping tiny, otherwise I’ll be rethinking this whole ‘natural childbirth’ idea).

We have a maximum of 57 x 45 in. for crib, change table and some kind of storage.  Yep, it’s a challenge.  I also have to accommodate my family who will be coming over for the birth and still have room for Sam to study as he’ll be heading into final exams – just after the baby is born.  Convenient.

So, here’s a few thoughts I have:

1. I’m actually considering an Ikea loft bed with a desk underneath.  Bed for mom, plus office area for Sam:

Obviously the ladder isn’t ideal for your average grandma to be, but my mom isn’t your average grandmother (she was a PE teacher – nuff said).

Ok, so the bed combo aint sexy, but it might work.  Never mind Ikea is an 18 hour drive away and they don’t seem to deliver this particular bed…it’s the idea we’re working with here people…

2. I have discovered there is such a thing as a ‘mini crib’.  Horray!  Here’s one:

This is by Bloom.  I love that it has wheels and is only 19.2 x 37 x 33 inches.

3. I’m on the search for a wall mounted change table that doesn’t look like I’m in a public washroom at Walmart.  It’s proving near impossible.  There’s this one by Bo Design,

but there’s something weird about it, like it’s a plywood toilet seat.  And it’s $750.

Not gonna lie – I have no idea how this is all going to pan out, but I do have another 3 months.  Surely we can pull it together by then?

Ideas welcome…

slow progress, but some progress…

So, we’re still here, though the renovating has slowed to fits and bursts – largely dependent on a) if anyone is coming to visit and b) if something just drives us crazy enough so we finally fix it.  I’m becoming surprisingly tolerant though.

Actually being back in school (or college for you guys in the UK – they think ‘school’ is for kids) is taking over all my spare time, and I actually want it that way.  When the view from your studio looks like this:

is it any wonder you want to spend all your time there?

When the baby comes I’m going to be stuck with the house (and in it I guess), but I only have less than 2 months (2 months!!!) to finish my fine art degree.  It feels like a race against time to empty everything creative in my head into amazing art projects before Christmas while I still have the chance.  I’ve actually had profs say ‘you won’t make any art once the baby comes’ and similar scary prophecies on a ‘children will ruin your life plans (oh, but they’re great too)’ theme and it’s stressing the beejezus out of me.

The fact that most of our light fixtures are mere dangling wires no longer seems to concern me (well, not as much).

The house is basically functional, though we still have no shower (all baths, all the time – it’s like living in England again), and until a week or so ago we had no heat.  Or, more accurately, we either had full blast heat, or none at all (which explains our crippling heating bills last year thanks to our last tenant obviously thinking extreme heat 24/7 was perfectly normal).   Turns out, the thermostat was actually connected to – nothing.

Crazy.  Nothing as pedestrian as actual wires, just stuck there like an ornamental relic.  For show, I guess.  Though nothing much surprises me about this house anymore.

So that was more money (as we are, as I might have mentioned, electrically challenged), though I’m trying not to think about it.  Finances are dire, and the only job I’ve been able to find is one hour a day at minimum wage in the Craft and Design office at the University.  So I might be able to spring for a new pair of socks to at least keep my feet warm.

But doom and gloom and dashed dreams of art careers aside…let’s see some before and after pics of the living room:

Yes, that would be the entire record collection piled precariously in the corner.  We’ve bought some shelves, now we just need to actually put them up.

Oh, and the wicker chair (scammed for free, left out in the rain, and not exactly ideal but nevermind) now replaces the matching green chair some of you might remember when we were downstairs.  Unfortunately, the crack it always had in the leg finally gave out and it’s been regulated to the nursery/office (which, frankly, is just a fancy name for ‘room of crap where Sam tries to study’).  The sofa is also making suspicious and very worrying creaking noises so we finally broke down and bought a new sofa this summer, which will arrive in about a year – or so it seems.  We were told 6 weeks, put down our (non-refundable) deposit, and then were called the next day and told it was actually going to be 16 weeks.  Nice.  So I keep forgetting we bought it at all.  I’ll update you all around Christmas time.

Yes, that is the door to the room we took off still propped in between the windows.  We can’t seem to agree whether or not to put it back on or not, so it sits there in limbo.  And that isn’t a sculpture in the corner on top of the speaker, it’s actually a lamp (made by my great aunt in England and shipped over with us) – just with no wiring and no lampshade.  Add it to the list…

Finally, of course, let’s not forget the hole:

It might not be the most professional job in the world, but hey, at least I don’t have a hole in my ceiling anymore.  One day (!) we might take down the entire dropped ceiling in this room and repair the original ceiling, but that, my friends, is somewhere near the very bottom of a very large list.

Oh yes, and we will put a light fixture here eventually.

Back to the studio…

a holiday from renovating – but no renovation fairies when we got back

I know!  Unbelievable.  We opened the door from a weekend away…and…nothing.  Place looked exactly as much of a gong show as we left it.  Stupid lazy reno fairies.  They’re probably busy over at HGTV, or, more likely, at ABC on Extreme Makeover, renovating for people with real problems who save lives or have life threatening illnesses.  Jerks.  They should come here!  I once stopped Sam from crossing the road at a pretty dangerous time, and I am suffering from a really bad cold…

So, we went away on a mini holiday for the weekend as we didn’t really take a break all summer.  We’re now both back at school full-time, which, strangely, almost feels relaxing compared with the chaos of the past few months.

We went to explore the wonders of Cape Breton and the natural glory that is the Cabot Trail, which, when Carly and Sam go, inevitably, looks something like this:

Typical.

But the house REALLY needs some attention, and just in case we weren’t feeling motivated, we have friends coming to stay next week.  Yikes.  Luckily they used to live on a boat, so I’m certain our shortcomings (no shower, limited space, no storage) can be overlooked.  It will mean getting some art up on the wall, however, as I am sick of a) not seeing it, and b) tripping over it.

I am promising myself that I will post some photos by the end of the week – if only to kick my ass in gear.  If I haven’t actually done anything (likely), then I will simply photograph what hasn’t been done.

And yes, all this is just a lame cover to hide the fact that again (again!) my camera battery is dead and I can’t photograph anything now.

(I have in fact bought a new ‘fancy’ camera for art purposes, but as it uses my old Nikon lenses – I was too cheap/poor to buy a digital lens as well – it still works as a fully manual camera.  Using a light meter to record the fact that you’re too lazy to have replaced baseboards anywhere in your house just seems like overkill.)

results are in! the energy audit, insulation, and some random updates

Ok, first off, can I just say how excruciatingly difficult it’s been to renovate without beer this summer?  Nightmare.  Just had to get that in there.

But moving on…or backwards I guess…the place still looks like a complete crap explosion so I’m not sharing any photos yet – well I might if I’m feeling especially sadistic – so for now I’m just going to catch up on what happened before we moved in.

You might remember my floor ‘experiments’ with white paint:

Well, basically I just ignored everyone’s advice and simply did another coat.  It turned out fine in the end, just a bit demoralizing when everyone stepped on it in their dirty work boots.

And that’s the carpet Sam bought at auction that he believes ‘fits’ the room.  Any excuse for a new rug…

But that room – which was the office and is now the ‘office/nursery’ (babies are small right, surely they don’t need a whole room?), is basically finished, which is why it’s now filled with everything we don’t yet have storage for.  (I posted a pic of that here, and it’s too depressing to repeat)

Our bedroom, however, is not finished.

Just to remind ourselves, here’s what the bedroom looked like when our tenant moved out:

We had to take down the plaster on the end wall as it was basically falling off anyway.

The rest of the plaster in the room was pretty grim too, but after dealing with it downstairs I was pretty confident that I could patch it to an acceptable level.  It’s called ‘character’ – just in case anyone was wondering…  And I’ll take some photos once I get off my lazy preggo ass and get round to it.  Yep, now I’m starting to show (had my first stranger ask when I was due – a bold move on his part to be sure), I’m using pregnancy as an excuse for Everything.  It’s awesome.

Obviously in an ideal world (which I sometimes fantasize involves buying a new house – I mean New), the plaster would be taken down and replaced with drywall and the walls would be insulated.

Oh!  Which reminds me – I never shared the results of our our energy audit!  You might remember we had the big fan thingy here so they could see how energy efficient, or not, our house is.

So, results are in, and out of a possible maximum score of 100 we scored…

drum roll please…

14.

Yes, 14.  14!  Out of 100.  We may as well be living in a tent.

I think the scoring system goes something like this:

100 – You are a perfect person living in a perfect house (I hate you and want to move in)
60-100 – You are a normal person living in a normal house.  Good for you.
40-60 – You have insulation – congrats!
under 30 – Drafty shack.
under 20 – Bus.
14 – Tent.
under 14 – You live outside.  Let’s hang out.  We’ll build fires.

So we got our skates on (and our line of credit) and got ourselves some blown-in insulation.  I really should have photographed the process as it was pretty epic, as were the fabulous grandpa-like guys in charge of it all (I got in trouble for flirting with them from Sam – I couldn’t help it!).  But I didn’t.  I generally suck at this ‘let’s photograph this for the blog’ thing – in case you haven’t noticed.  Again, let’s blame pregnancy.  I also regularly lose either the camera or the memory card, or the cable.  Sometimes all three.

So now the walls are actually insulated!  Very exciting.  But the bedroom wall still looks like this:

(Note carefully cropped photo so you don’t see the world of disaster I’m standing in to take the photo – the stereo speakers are still in here for goodness sake.)

And yes – that’s just wooden lathe behind the headboard.  The thin fabric-y cover was put there by the blown in insulation guys when the insulation they blew in started blowing right into the room.  Whoops – I may have forgotten to tell them we had a wall missing.

I guess we’ll probably have to do something about it by winter.

ready to move? hell no. but let’s do it anyway.

So let’s rewind a little bit and update on what happened (or didn’t) over the past few weeks.

The biggest debacle turned out to be the bathroom (no, it’s still not finished).

As we ran out of money to pay a handyman friend, we had no choice but to finish it ourselves and embarked on a romantic day of grouting.

Unfortunately, there was a lot of shit (I’m told the technical term is ‘adhesive’ or ‘mortar’) to scrape off first.

Two hours later (yes 2 – less said about this the better), we were finally ready to grout.

Now, I have since learned that grouting while pregnant is possibly one of the worst things you can do.  The instructions said to keep away from children, but that didn’t compute in my brain into keeping it away from unborn children.  Yikes.  I didn’t even wear a mask as it doesn’t smell toxic, or like anything really.  My friend told me her grout said it was only harmful to unborn children in California, so I’m hoping that means a fetus in Nova Scotia will be ok…

So yes, in a nutshell, the bathroom renovation has turned into a gong show with all sorts of frustrating, fetus-harming, and upsetting repercussions.  And we had no choice but to move in without it finished.

Luckily Sam was able to get the toilet in just before the big move,

with only one minor flooding crisis.  Impressive.  So we had a toilet, but no working sink or shower.  Which also meant that we weren’t able to re-tile or put new floor in the downstairs bathroom as we were still showering down there until the day before our tenants moved in.

But such is the fun of renovating.  Or so I’m told.

With only one weekend remaining before our tenants were moving in and Sam working almost every single day and night (someone has to pay for mom and baby’s growing addiction to KFC chicken burgers), we had one free Saturday to move so we put the call out to all our amazing friends.

Were we ready?  Hell no.  Were we even remotely packed and organized?  Don’t be ridiculous.

Our idea was that a handful of friends would sporadically show up, help move the large items of furniture, and then we would, somewhat leisurely, bring up the rest in a civilized manner over the course of the week.  Our friends, on the other hand, had very different ideas.  Arriving in droves starting at 9am they were like a military operation on steroids.  Random containers were used to ferry everything from books to that embarrassing crap you find lurking in drawers but can’t throw out, emptied upstairs and then filled again.

Unbelievable, wonderful, total chaos.  Everything got moved.  EVERYTHING.

And so – boom, we were moved.  We had no shower, no stove, no bathroom sink, no door on the bathroom, and no idea where any of our belongings had ended up.  But it was done.

Never underestimate the power of a keg of beer.

end of an era, but ready for tenants…finally!

A HUGE sigh of relief as downstairs is finally ready for our new tenants.  And not a moment too soon – they arrive in about 2 hours.

So strange to see it empty of all our stuff.  It’s like going back to the beginning before we moved in and pretending it always looked this way.

We finally did all the little things we’d been meaning to do for ages: re-caulk the tub, paint the baseboards, put the heating covers back on the heaters (I know, ridiculous).

But it’s the end of an era…

This was just heartbreaking to erase.  Sigh.

Meanwhile, however, our ‘new’ place upstairs looks like an episode of hoarders:

Don’t even ask how we’re able to manage actually living here.  I’m not sure myself.

Updates (embarrassing as they are) to follow shortly.  You probably won’t be surprised to learn that in the cyclone that seems to have erupted, I temporarily ‘lost’ the camera.  I took photos with my phone for a bit, but now that cable seems to have been swallowed – somewhere.

Anyway – oh crap, tenants are here – early!

Onwards…