Looking Ahead at 2013.

The corner of the living room does look a little bare right now.  The tree is down and the decorations are packed away for another year.   Another year, another Christmas gone by.  A new year brings hope of something better, excitement of things to come and knowing to enjoy it day by day.

We have some big changes coming us to this year.  It's hard for us to believe that Erica will be moving out to University in nine months. Wow! How can that be?  By the end of this year it will just be the three of us at home and I'm sure that will be a bit of an adjustment to us all.   As quantity of time inevitably diminishes as the girls get older we want to make sure we have quality time together.  We'll have to work at continuing as many family dinners as we can and just spending time together.

I have some things I'd like to work on professionally.  I want to be more proactive with planning, sales goals and effective marketing.  I think to take things to the next level I do need to consider the business side of things in conjunction with the creative side.   To continue to be profitable and competitive I can't just follow every pretty bead I see.  I think sometimes beads to me are like squirrels to our dog Mabel. Beads!! Squirrel! (if you know what I mean!)

I want to start painting the walls again.  A few years ago, and before I opened my etsy shop, I was painting rooms all the time.  Paint chips and swatches could be constantly found taped to our walls as I considered future colours.  It's definitely time to do this again and I'm ready.

To do this I need to find a better balance of my time with work and our home.  One of my biggest goals this year is to organize and clean the house.  This goal will involve other members of the house but we're all ready to get rid of all the stuff we've accumulated over the last several years.  We've been in this house for 15 years now and it shows.  My mind thinks big when it comes to organization (everything cleaned in the next 2 weeks!!) but I know this will be a long term process.  Drawer by drawer, cupboard by cupboard.  The time spent will be time saved later on when you don't have to go searching through mounds of stuff to find things.  Most importantly for me though is that less clutter just makes for a calmer feeling.

Some sorted inspiration!  (Style at Home)

We started our organization plans off right by sorting and purging all our Christmas boxes.  We had decorations that haven't seen the light of day for years.  We still have a lot of Christmas boxes but they are labelled and everything in them is something we use. We are still missing a box of decorations that we could not find this year but I'm sure it will show up over the year when we tackle the basement.










I'd like to grow about 3 inches taller but while I wait for that to happen we will continue to walk more and eat healthy.  For me, I need to make sure to take the time for myself to do these things.

A picture from a beautiful walk we took at my parent's cottage over the holidays.

Happy New Year everyone.  Any plans for your year ahead?

Renovating my Life.

During renovations you sure do notice all the other things in your house that need fixing or a face lift. Suddenly, the hall paint is looking pretty dingy and the carpeting...oh my, the carpeting...it will have to do for now with a cleaning after all this over.  We moved into this house with the existing carpeting and we're lucky it's a  neutral gray colour but it is worn and dirty and has really given us all it can give (add it to the list!).

Also, when we moved in almost every room had border wallpaper.  Some rooms had more than one border design!  We slowly moved through each room stripping wallpaper and border and choosing a more palatable palette. It's funny, now we are at the point in time that we are upgrading our own upgrades. What I once loved is ready for a change. The whole family knows the impending painting projects as they are greeted by tiny paint chips slipped into door frames or taped to the walls in different rooms.  My mind is always one step ahead of the work in progress when it comes to wall paint.  (I suppose that could be annoying to others!!)

For now though, I must concentrate on the bathroom colours.  I'm thinking we'll go pretty neutral but I do find neutral sometimes trickier - all of the sudden a once perfect paint chip looks greenish on the wall.  I also don't want it to look too boring or wishy washy.   One thing I have learned is that it's so important to buy the sample can and try it before you paint.  I like to put two coats onto a board that I can move around the room and view it at different times of the day.  Room lighting is so important and the amount of natural light can really change the look of a paint.  I also live by "it's only paint".  After sampling go for your gut.  It's usually right and if it's wrong you usually know pretty quickly so it's not a really costly mistake.  (Not like tile choices and locations of faucets...oh my I've had enough of these decisions lately!!)

Here's our bathroom at the end of last week.  You can see my two sample colour boards above the vanity. (inukshuk CC-460) and (pale oak OC-20) Unfortunately neither of these seem exactly right.  I'm looking at a couple of other colours now - one with a bit more grey and even one with a tinge of blue.  Hopefully I'll be able to get to the paint store tonight so I can have the samples ready for tomorrow.  We should be able to start priming the walls tomorrow night.

We're really happy with everything.  The shower looks amazing.  As I write this the plumber is hooking up the faucets and the toilet.  We might even have a working bathroom in the very near future! 

Hello September!

I'm not sure what happened to the end of summer.  It somehow just flew by.  I'm not sad though as I always do love September and the fall weather.  September has always felt like the beginning of the new year and I always love that feeling.  This year there is also the promise of completed renovations.

In August I have grown used to the daily banging and scraping noises coming from our bathroom upstairs.  I can now tune out the two top squeeky stairs that I hear everytime the contractors go up and down the stairs.  I have accepted the fact that our house is encased in a thick coat of dust even right after vacuuming.

We've made such progress though and we're really happy with the changes.

We've gone from a completely blank room to new flooring.

We've chosen large 24 x24" porcelain tile with a neutral stone look.

Our shower went from this...

...to this.  You can also catch a glimpse of our new vanity.

The shower was completely tiled this week and the countertop was installed.  I'll take pictures this weekend to show next week.  Hopefully by the end of the coming week it will be very close to a finished bathroom.  I'm so excited!  With school starting this week and four of us trying to get ready in the morning we will be thankful to have the extra space.

I also have some very exciting news.  A pair of my earrings are featured in the Fall 2012 edition of  DIY Weddings.  It's available now to order in print and will be available to download later this month.

I'm very excited and can't wait to see the feature!

...and the walls came tumbling down.

The renovations have begun.

Before.

I've decided to show you real before pictures.  I took the photos as the bathroom was.  I didn't put away the bottles of shampoos and lotions and things.  I really wanted to show the transformation to a space that made us cringe to hopefully a peaceful space with an actual working bath tub! You can see here we kind of gave up on this bathroom a while ago.  The windows were replaced a few years back but we never did replace the window coverings. Yes, those are sheets that we used as curtains tacked to the wall. It can only get better!

After demolition.

 Gone is the vanity and tub. Not a thing left.  The bathroom is totally gutted.

Before.

I will not miss the purple on the walls. It seemed fine at the time when I painted it years ago but once we repainted our master bedroom it clashed.  I had really lost any enthusiasm to repaint while things were breaking and we knew repairs and renovations were in the future.

There goes the shower.  (good riddance!)

After demolition.

...and it looks promising.  Some expected water damage (but no mold which is great) and a weird pipe thingie (yes, that is the correct term) in the wrong spot that needs to be relocated.  A new subfloor needs to go in but best to start the work correctly.

Happy Weekend.

I've been enjoying this week.  Slowly getting back into work while spending some time with the girls.  Uneventful time, just hanging out together which is just the way I like it. I guess this weekend we'll finally have to take down the Christmas decorations.  It's so strange for me this year as I didn't have the urgent need to pack it all up right after New Year's like I usually do.  The girls are back to school on Monday and I do prefer to have everything taken down and stored away before then.   Together, the four of us can do it pretty quickly.

Mabel on Christmas Day.

I've got the painting bug again. Which feels nice.  The living room is almost finished.  We're still waiting for a chair and lamp to arrive in February and the walls are a bare canvas for some artwork.  When it's all done I'll post the big reveal.  Now I'm ready to start thinking about the front hallway and maybe even the tv room in the basement.

Today's big job involves me replacing our front door lock.  All of the sudden it has decided that enough is enough.  Hopefully I can find something reasonably priced that can get us by for now and that doesn't require alot of adjustment from our current one...and more importantly that it doesn't take the better part of my day and multiple trips to Home Depot.  I guess I should be happy that the temperatures are unusually warm today (7°C) which will help while working with the door open.

* yeah, I've already changed the lock and didn't spend a dime.  I remembered that when I changed the hardware years ago I didn't change the actual lock.  The miracle is not that it didn't take me too long to install but that I had remembered and found the lock in our basement. Go me! Love knocking things like this off the list!!

Have a great weekend everyone.  See you next week.

Summer Fades to Autumn

It is feeling much more like fall today.  It's still a decent 18 degrees but it's cloudy and raining on and off.  Within a couple of days leaves have fallen and you can hear them crunch underfoot.  We've quickly gone from summer weather to more of what you would expect for fall.  We still haven't had the heat on yet although I'm sure that's just around the corner and I'm still wearing sandals and capris.  Quite quickly I'm going to look out of place, not to mention chilly.

Last weekend we were still enjoying our garden in sunshine and t-shirts.  I loved having a moment to watch the birds and I love the unexpected fall blooms.

Have a wonderful weekend everyone!