Another thing to add to the list of things I never thought of before I moved to a snowy place: Too much snow on a roof can make it collapse! Fortunately D knows about these things. The roof on the main part of the house is steep enough that it isn't a problem, but we (well, D) had to shovel the snow off the shop and the addition at the back of the house. These pics are from a few weeks ago.
So for the past 2 days, the temperature has been above freezing, and this has led me to declare that winter is ending and spring is coming. Because I said so. I haven't actually said this out loud to any one who lives here because I don't want people to laugh in my face and shatter my hopes. So until I am proven wrong, I declare that spring is on its way. Since the snow has been melting like crazy, I went out this morning to document the accumulation of snow before it all disappears.
I tried to use Nova beside the snow banks at the end of the driveway to give it some perspective, but clearly I know nothing about photography.
The giant snow banks that have built up at the end of the driveway are taller than my car. When I back out of the driveway in the morning, I mostly just hope that no one is coming because I really can't see anything. There is rain in the forecast for the next few days, so perhaps the snow will all wash away most of the snowbanks so that I don't have to risk my life every time I leave my house.
It has been ages since my last post, but I will have a bunch of new ones over the next little while because I have been storing them all up. I have been insanely busy with work for over a month now. First I had a grant deadline, then a manuscript deadline, then a manuscript revision that took waaaaayyy too long, then a presentation, plus all of my teaching work. It has been crazy, but I am mostly enjoying it.
So, over the past 6 weeks or so, I have been spending excessive amounts of time working in my home office, and I realized that I still hadn't posted pics of it yet. So here they are:
First, we painted it a beautiful shade of purple:
Then D built me some bookshelves.
Then I painted them. I was so proud of myself for being so crafty. Usually I avoid this type of thing like the plague because it seems like too much work, and because I have absolutely no hand-eye coordination and everything I touch turns to crap. But! I painted the shelves and my office and LIKED IT. And both look totally fine.
Here is the finished version:
I absolutely love it. I can't believe I have never painted a room in my life. Every time I am in here it makes me so happy. I can't wait to paint the whole damn house!
So, as mentioned in a previous post, from time to time, when it rains, the basement of our house floods a bit. Today when I went down to do laundry, I realized that the entire basement was seriously flooded and was under about 2-3" of water!
My first plan was to use the shop vac to suck it all up, but after a couple of buckets full of water, I realized the shop vac was no match for this flood. We had been talking about getting a sump pump for the basement and now seemed as good a time as any to get one. D went to the store and came back with a submersible pump and a hose.
First we directed the hose into the sink, but the pump worked a bit too well, and the water came rushing through the hose so fast that that the sink couldn't really handle it.
This is when D decided to drill a hole through the side of the house, much to my dismay. We ran the hose out to the ditch beside our house, and pumped the water into there. Der then started sweeping the water our of the laundry room.
Most of the water was gone in about 10 minutes. The basement was still soaked, but at least it wasn't splashable any more.
This house was clearly built to flood, since everything in the basement is about 6" off the ground. You can see the hot water heater in the pic above perched on a 6 in tall block. The furnace, chimney, and oil tank are all also about 6" off the ground.
Once we had gotten all the major water out of the house, it started to seep back in. I was surprised since it hadn't been raining for a few hours, but I guess the ground was still really damp. We decided to leave it for an hour, and then I went back down with the shop vac to clean up the new water. It wasn't very effective, so now we are waiting until later in the evening to hopefully do one last vacuum of all the remaining water. Then we will start a fire in the wood stove to attempt to dry it out a bit. We still haven't bought a dehumidifier. We should probably get on that.
For most of July and August, the weather in Sackville was unbearably hot and humid. Ever since the hurricane/tropical storm swept through, it has been bloody freezing. Somehow we completely skipped over Fall and went straight from summer to winter. Last night there was a frost warning. For the past several days, I have had to walk Nova with gloves and a toque on. How is this possible in September? It also doesn't help that our heating systems are not as automatic as the electric and natural gas heating I have been used to all my life. I actually don't even know what kind of heat the main heater is at my parents' house, all I know is that it is controlled by lever on a thermostat and is easy.
Here in our old house in our small town in rural canada, we have two options, neither of which seem particularly easy to me.
One is an old (1959) furnace.
Powered by oil, which is stored in this tank.
The other is an old (god knows how old) wood stove.
Powered by, well, wood.
Both of these sources of heat require maintenance before using them for the first time after not being used all summer. In addition to the basic maintenance, our chimney, which houses the output for both the furnace and the wood stove, is in shambles. So that needs to be repaired and hopefully it will be done soon since it also allows water to leak into the basement when it rains.
Today, since D has a visitor in town to assist him (apparently I am not good enough), he is cleaning out the chimney for the wood stove.
Which is apparently quite dirty. At last check, there was this much soot that had been banged out of the pipe.
I am also happy to report that when I went outside to take pictures, I realized that it is actually kind of warming up today. It is about 19 degrees Celsius (66 Fahrenheit). I guess we might get a couple of decent days before winter fully sets in. Also, this weekend is the Sackville Fall Fair, and since today is the perfect day to be outside, I think that is where we are heading.
Since living in Sackville, D and I have had some difficulty figuring out what to do with our garbage. In previous places we have lived, the rules have been pretty simple and similar from place to place. In previous places (Vancouver, Surrey, Austin) glass, plastic, cans, and paper products can be recycled, and everything else goes in the regular garbage. In Sackville, garbage is separated into wet and dry. The first day we got to our house, we found this nice laminated list of trash items that are wet, dry, hazardous household waste.
You would think it would be fairly straight forward, but honestly, I don't think anything has ever caused us this much confusion in our lives. First we had to go get the appropriate coloured bags. Green for wet and blue for dry. Then we had to try to remember which one was which. When I first set them up in our dual garbage cans, I put all of the wet stuff in the blue (dry) bag. So then I had to take the blue bag and put it in a green bag. There was no threat of fines if we got it wrong, like I have seen in Ontario, but I was still worried we might get arrested by the garbage police. Okay, so we had our bags and we had the colour system figured out. Then came the debates over pretty much every thing we put in the garbage.
Some things were obvious. Paper goes in dry. Banana peels go in wet. What about a juice box? The dry list said, "Dry waste must be clean to ensure it can be recycled." A juicebox could not be rinsed out because the hole was so small and there was usually a tiny bit of juice left behind. So it wasn't really dry and clean. But D was convinced that the wet garbage should only contain compost materials, so he wouldn't let me put it in there either. He thought that there must be a third type of bag that we should use for non-compostable and non-dry garbage. I looked it up online, and it seemed like there were only 2 categories - wet and dry.
Every time we went to put something in the garbage for the first few weeks we had to check the list. Old socks? Dry. Paper towel? Wet. Broken dishes? Dry. Pencil shavings? Wet. Tim Horton's coffee cup? I say wet, D says dry. You can see how confusing it might be.
The other day at school, I saw a sign that clarified things a bit more for me. It said, "If you wouldn't put it on your head, it's wet waste." Ha! I have been using that as my reference point. And it does seem to help...a bit.
For the most part, D and I both liked the way our new house had been decorated by the previous homeowner. One thing that D hated, though, were the quotations stenciled on the wall. I thought they were painted on, but they were actually just decals and so easily removable.
D's first act of decorating was to remove all of these decals because they did not fit with his manliness. I was able to snap some pictures of them before they were destroyed forever.
It has rained a few times since we have been here and we haven't noticed anything like this, but yesterday, right around high tide for the Bay of Fundy, we noticed an awful lot of water in the basement. It wasn't that deep or anything, but it seemed to be seeping in from all sides of the basement. It was especially watery near the washer and dryer. It receded once the rain stopped, but it was still pretty weird. Does this happen to everyone around here? Is our house defective?
Today the ground was still damp so we lit a fire in the wood stove in the basement to try to dry it all out. There doesn't seem to be any visible mold in the basement, so maybe this was just a freak occurrence. I guess only time will tell.
While I do love the fireplace, I am not a fan of having a double garage, complete with automatic garage door openers, in which I am not permitted to park my car.
Moving Day was officially June 15th, but I have been slow to get up to day on this here bloggy-blog. Now the moment you have all been waiting for, pictures of the new house!
But first, a story. On the big day, we rushed to check out of our hotel and head to Sackville. We were supposed to meet the realtor at 8:30 am for a walk through of the new house, and then await the official closing. We got there a bit late, and that was just the beginning of our annoyingly annoying day. After walking through the house, we were supposed to call the lawyer and let him know that everything was okay, and that he could start the closing process. I tried to do that, but when I called the lawyer's office, the phone was just dead. No ringing, no nothing. I called D's phone, and it worked just fine, so it seemed that something was up with the lawyer's phone. Fortunately it is a small town, so we just drove down there to see them in person. We handed over our certified check, told them everything looked good, and the lawyer's assistant said it should take about an hour for the mortgage money to be deposited into the account. We went to the bank to open an account, and then walked the dog around for a while. After about an hour and a half, the lawyer's assistant called to tell us that the money was still not there and that she had a call in to the mortgage company. Since we now knew it might take a while, we headed down to the local lake so Nova could play in the park. It was a really windy day, but the sky was mostly blue. It looked really cool down at the lake.
Also, Nova was kind of scared of the waves, which was funny.
Soon it was after noon and the lawyer had originally said everything would be done by noon at the latest. I called over to the lawyer's office and was told that the computers at the mortgage company had gone down this morning, which is why they had not yet transferred the money. But don't worry, it will be sent right now!!
Because we had the dog with us (and that's a whole other story - we were supposed to drop her off at a friend's, but kind of forgot) we couldn't really go anywhere that involved being inside for too long. So aside from going to the lake, we spent most of the day sitting in the van in various parking lots around town. Tim Hortons was sort of our home base, but we also sat in the grocery store parking lot and the liquor store parking lot.
By 3:00, after 6 hours of waiting, we still hadn't heard anything, so I called the lawyer's office again. This time I was told that there seemed to be a problem with the wire transfer, so the assistant had called the bank to put a trace on it because it had been sent, but had never arrived (I am not really sure how these things work). So, more waiting.
Finally, at about 4:30, we got the call that we officially owned the house, and we could come pick up our keys! Thank Jeebus!
So, here are some pictures:
Master Bedroom (We do have actual sheets on the bed now, but this was the first day. Also, we had to saw off a piece of the boxspring to get it up the stairs):
Spare room (for all the visitors we hope to have):
My soon-to-be-awesome home office:
Stairs and hallway to the enclosed front porch (My camera doesn't do justice to the colour of the walls, which are lime green):
The front porch (soon to be populated with chairs):
The kitchen (complete with human dishwasher):
The living room (before we moved in because right now it is a disaster):
A bad picture of the dining room (I will post another when we get our new table):
Downstairs bathroom and mudroom (also taken before we moved in):
And Nova's favorite place (not including the 1.7 acre yard), the back deck:
Time to celebrate!
That last picture took about 5 takes to get. Clearly we are not gifted in the realm of self-portraits.
