Home tour – A look back

Although we’re happy and excited and relieved that our house in Ottawa is sold, it’s kind of bittersweet. We lived in that house for 13-1/2 years and really put our hearts and souls into making it our own. After my last post about packing and stuffing all our things into boxes, I thought it would be nice to take a look back at our house in all its clean and tidy and ready-to-sell glory. Because trust me, our house never looked as good as it did when it was up for sale!

There’s a story behind every room, but if I tell each story this could end up being the longest blog post ever! I shared a lot of these room makeovers on my old blog, so if you’d like to read more about a room, click the picture and if I blogged about it, you’ll be taken to the blog post.

Loft/Home theatre

Main floor

Basement

Wow! When you put pictures of all the rooms in our house together, you realize that there are a LOT of rooms!

A big thank you to our real estate agent Eric Perron for working so hard to sell our house. We met Eric and his family when they adopted our foster dog Sophie and and we’ve been friends ever since :-) If you’re looking for a great real estate agent in Ottawa, he’s your guy :-)

Next up, more progress on our Nova Scotia house!

All photographs by Greg Tilley

Catch up time – SOLD!

It took a year, but in mid-May, we finally got an offer on our house. Three offers in one day, in fact! We accepted the best of the bunch, and we can finally call our house SOLD! Then we had only two weeks to pack up and move everything from Ottawa to Nova Scotia. EEEK!

I flew to Ottawa on May 19th to start the packing. In my mind, there wasn’t much to do – after all, we’d done a lot of packing and purging before we put the house up for sale last May. Ummmmm…. wrong! SO. MUCH. STUFF. EVERYWHERE. Even after selling a bunch of stuff, there was still way more stuff to pack than I thought there would be.

 

 

It was a LOT of work – luckily interspersed with fun with friends and my dad who came for a few days to help. Thank you Rona for all the help with the kitchen packing!

Then  I came back to Nova Scotia and Brian went to Ottawa to finish the packing. Seems I had underestimated my packing accomplishments, because Brian still had a crapload of work to do. Plus he and his friends had to pack up the moving truck.  A 26 foot long moving truck, and it was literally packed to the max!

28 hours after leaving Ottawa, Brian got back to NS at 1:00 in the morning, and then spent half an hour backing the truck and trailer into the driveway. With just some minor damage to the lawn – Oopsie!

It looks so innocent just sitting there in the driveway…

And then this happened…. a U-Haul explosion! And these pics don’t include all the furniture that went right from the truck into the basement for storage.

 

 

 

Empty!

 

Take my advice – don’t move unless you absolutely have to. It’s really not much fun!

Catch up time – The house has begun!

May 18th was a big day at the lot. Not only did we finish shingling another side of the garage, but the excavation crew showed up to start work on the house. WOOT!

Excavator #1 started digging out the hole for the house foundation.

And then excavator #2 showed up with a breaker. Basically, it’s a big metal pounding thing that breaks up rock. Our house is being built on a LOT of rock, so the big guns were called in to break up enough rock so that we can get a crawl space under the house.

An inch worm stopped by to check things out :-)

And then just when things had gotten exciting, I had to go back to Ottawa for a week. GAK! But it wasn’t all bad – the reason for my trip to Ottawa is up next…

Catch up time – Garage progress

Eeek, it’s been few weeks since my last post. But, there’s a good reason for that – LOTS of exciting stuff has been going on and Brian and I have been crazy-busy. Time to play some catch-up!

First, let’s get up to speed on the garage. Last time I posted pics, we were working on the shingling. And we’re still working on the shingling. We might be shingling for the next three years - this garage is one big sucker! But we’ve gotten quite a bit of shingling done since my last garage update…

May 6th – Back side – DONE!

Then we moved to the south end and front of the garage…

May 18th – Front side – DONE! And if I may toot my horn just a bit, I did almost all of the shingling on this side myself :-) This is also around the time I started losing my marbles and kept repeating “Puppy Monkey Baby” over and over and thinking it was the most hilarious thing ever. Don’t ask me why!

Meanwhile, Brian was making good progress on the south end of the garage…

And the front & end together…

Some random shots from around the garage…

May 18th was a big day for another reason – that’s up next!