Thinking outside the bedroom box

While Brian has been working on the electrical and plumbing. I’ve been thinking more and more about decorating the interior of the house. There are soooooooo many decisions that need to be made – why are there so many paint colours and countertop stones and tiles?!

When I get overwhelmed with all of those choices, I like to think about a simpler room. Like the bedroom. I mean, really, it’s just a bed and a few pieces of furniture and some knicknacks and a light, right? Well, not necessarily. When there are skylights on one wall and windows on another wall and closets on another wall, that really just leaves one wall for everything.

What to do….

This is where we had originally thought we would put the bed, with the headboard against the pony wall facing the west windows. Which is a nice view, but mostly of trees. Not quite to scale, but you get the idea :-)

It’s really the only logical spot. Or is it….

A few years ago on an Australian renovation show that I watch, one of the couples came up with an interesting idea for positioning the bed in their master bedroom.

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I don’t think a bed in the middle of this room works particularly well, but it’s certainly thinking outside the box. And in the right room, it could be a great solution to where to put the furniture. Like in a bedroom with skylights on one wall and windows on another wall and closets on another wall…

This configuration solves some potential problems. For starters, the headboard itself doubles as a wall and provides some privacy.

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There really isn’t any space for a dresser against the sloped sides of the room, so now the dresser can go behind the headboard or even be the headboard.

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We have a king size bed, so there really isn’t much room on either side for night tables. But we can solve that problem by installing lights on the headboard wall and incorporating a niche to hold an iPad, books, a clock, and other stuff.

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Depending on how high the headboard wall is,  it can even provide a spot to hang art, which is something I desperately need!

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And best of all, with the bed positioned in the middle of the room facing the skylights, we’ll have a clear view of the ocean. Who wouldn’t want to wake up to that every morning?!

So what do you think – is a bed floating in the middle of the room with a room divider headboard a weird idea or a good idea?

Shut the front door!

And it only took 13 months ;-) The last thing to go in was the front door. We ordered the Jasper door from Atlantic Windows with a transom window and a clear window in the door. (So not like the Jasper door in this picture!)

When the door arrived a couple of months ago, there were some problems with it – the hinges were on the wrong side, and they had installed the wrong window. And then we discovered another bigger problem. We were planning to pair the front door from Atlantic Windows with a window on each side from Polytech (which we hadn’t yet ordered). But one manufacturer’s white isn’t another manufacturer’s white, and the difference between the white on the door frame and the white on the windows was pretty obvious. Also, the transom window over the door wasn’t going to line up properly with the transom windows on the side windows.

What to do……

I knew that if we stuck with our original plan, I would regret it every time I drove up to the house. Afterall, the front door is like a welcome sign into your home, and if it’s not working for you, then it’s not saying “Welcome” so much as it’s saying “I’m the wrong door”.

It took a few mock-ups and some persuading & support from Facebook friends, but in the end we took a bit of a loss on the original door and placed a new order from Atlantic for a door with two sidelights and a transom straight across the top. Which is the configuration I wanted right from the start of the house building process. And you know what they say – happy wife, happy life :-)

The new and improved front door arrived a couple of weeks ago, and I’m happy to report that it’s perfect! It’s also incredibly heavy, so luckily Brian was able to recruit a strong guy to help him put it into place :-) And here it is, complete with a bright green paint job (Benjamin Moore Douglas Fir) and a Baldwin Hardware handle set from Bargain Harley’s in Berwick.

I can’t decide if the best thing about the front door going in is that the house is finally weather-tight, or that we don’t have to listen to Tyvek flapping in the wind anymore!

And all was not lost with the original front door. We were able to get a credit for the door itself, but we had to suck up the cost of the door frame, which wasn’t returnable. So Brian removed the transom window from the door frame and converted it into a little east-facing window in the downstairs bedroom.

Other than installing the front door and the little window, Brian has mainly been working on the plumbing and electrical for the last month or two. So there really hasn’t been anything very exciting to share. But at least that means that we’re getting closer to installing drywall and being able to finally get to work on the inside of the house!

The Living Beach – July 1, 2017

We had a cool and grey Canada Day here, but it was a fun day nonetheless. We started the celebration with our friends Barb & Avy’s lovely beach wedding – I lost track of how many lobster sliders and cookies I ate! Sooooooo good!  And ended the day with some awesome fireworks.

And it’s also time to celebrate the living beach :-) It’s been interesting to see how the beach has changed (or not changed) over the last 11 months. One thing is for sure – there are a lot more rocks on the beach this year than there were at this same time the last two years. The last two years, I could ride my bike from one end of the beach to the parking lot. This year, there are still far too many rocks blocking the way. But there’s definitely a lot more sand on the beach now then there was a month ago.

And looking back at the beach one month ago compared to today… a big difference!

This is the same rock in March and in June – it shrank!

What will the next month bring? Hopefully lots more sand!