Bathroom Ta-Da!

Everyone keeps asking if we're finished with the house renovations... well, it's a house - one is never "done" a house!

But here at least is one finished room... or at least it's mostly finished.

Of course, despire poring through my files, I can't find a "before" photo.  So here's a photo of the old vinyl flooring that I found underneath the vanity in the upstairs bathroom:

Ick.  Interestingly, I actually found a very similar design in one of the major flooring companies' online catalogues.

So this room was completely gutted - walls, flooring, windows, the whole nine yards.  We re-arranged the layout a bit, since the original layout had the toilet facing the door.  We also made the doorway a bit wider, which came in handy when Kid 2 was in a wheelchair for a few weeks.  I love the way the flooring turned out... it's a Tarkett fibrefloor (vinyl) that is lovely and warm and cushy, but it looks like marble tile.  Did I mention it's warm underfoot?  A treat for the feet.

I hate tile surrounds in a shower/bath enclosure, so we went with a one-piece fiberglass tub/shower enclosure that the contractor picked out for me at Glass World.  I'm very happy with his choice - it's narrower at the foot/faucet end so filling it uses a bit less water, and it's nicely contoured for leaning back against.  

The contractor usually likes to recommend Toto dual-flush toilets for their reliability, but it just wasn't in our budget.  He did say that he'd had clients who had picked up toilets from Costco (without asking him) and while he had misgivings about it, they seemed to have no problems with them, so we went to Costco to check them out.  I was thrilled to see that they only had 2 toilets available, both at a very good price, so we went for the nicer and slightly more expensive one.  And I didn't have to look at an entire aisle of toilets.

A few weeks ago I installed some open shelves above the toilet for holding all the bathroom stuff.  I re-used shelves and shelf supports that I had on hand, but I think they came from Ikea.  The galvanized mini-buckets are plant pots, also from Ikea, and the green baskets are from Daiso.  On the windowsill is a tower of swing-out containers that we use to store all our hair do-dads.  Every woman with long hair should have a hair do-dad storage tower.  And that oblong thing between the toilet and the wall?  A brilliant Ikea item from a few years ago - the lid lifts up to reveal toilet-paper storage (it holds 9 rolls), and at the back is a toilet brush in its own container that you can lift out so you don't drip icky toilet water anywhere.  

When it came time to install the vanity, I didn't have much time, so I had to go with whatever I found in stock at the home improvement store.  This one was an all-but-the-faucet-in-one and while it was more blindingly white than I had in mind, I really liked the clean-lined sink top on it - no weird corners for gunk to build up.  The shaker door style fits in with my kitchen cabinets and, fortunately, the bathroom door swings such that you can't really compare the colours directly.

The mirror actually came with the house - it was a dusty old mirror with a tacky gold lumpy/carved frame that I found by the furnace in the basement.  I painted the frame shiny black, and replaced the old mirror.  It took a while for Husband Man and I to sort out how it would be mounted - and then he surprised me by putting it up one weekend while I was at work!

Kid 2 insisted that we had to have this faucet.  It cost about $40 more than I wanted to spend, so I told him that if he wanted it, he would have to chip in from his allowance savings, and he readily agreed.

I'm glad he insisted.  This is a lovely piece of jewelry in my bathroom.  It's a Price-Pfister faucet and despite the same brand's failure in my kitchen (long sad story), this one has performed well.

Of course it's not completely done!

If you were paying attention, you might have noticed that the door swings towards the vanity.  I reversed the door swing hoping that it would work better this way.  But it means you have to close the door to use the sink.  That's not a big deal.  A bigger problem: we forgot to tell the electrician about the change in door swing, so the switches are all behind the door.  I hate that, but will have to live with it for now.  

The plastic drawer unit next to the vanity holds important supplies like band-aids and the like.  I just needed that extra little bit of storage and we had this one on hand.  It's not very attractive, but it works just fine for now.  Eventually I'd like to put a set of cabinetry drawers here, but it's tricky finding fully-functional drawers in that width (it definitely can't be wider than 12")

And I'd like to install a small tile backsplash behind the sink.  Just a few rows of subway tile would do the trick.  I will likely tackle that job when I do the backsplash in the kitchen.

Farmer Lori Gets her Grow On!

As part of our renovations before we moved in, we had to have the drainage system around the house completely redone, and replace the main water line into the house and the storm water and sewer drains lines out of the house.  Which meant that what little landscaping there was around the house was mostly destroyed.  And then we moved in and had so much else going on inside the house that we didn’t have time to deal with the outside.

So here’s what it looked like last fall:

Yes, that’s horsetail fern down the middle North side of our east-facing front-yard. (Plus blackberry and ivy and lots of dandelions.  Probably the worst looking yard on the block.)  I wasn’t too fussed about it, since I like the look of horsetail fern, and I think they’re cool plants.  They’ve now spread a bit further and are very well established.  At least they’re green, I thought.  Until I started reading about them this Spring.  They’re very hard to get rid of.

Well, I have never been a fan of lawns.  Eventually I’d like to terrace this bit (there’s a steep hilly portion) and have one level full of asparagus, and the level closest to the sidewalk full of medicinal plants like Echinacea and Valerian.  But first I have to get rid of the horsetail fern.  And there aren’t many plants that can outcompete it, and even herbicides are pretty much useless if I wanted to go down that road (and I don’t).  Digging it out is impossible because they have very deep roots and even the tiniest bit of root will re-grow into lush horsetail ferns.  They prefer low-nutrient soils (and hog whatever they do find).

So here’s the new plan:

Grow CORN!  In my front yard!  For five years!

Yep, I’m gonna dig me some rows, fertilize ‘em and grow me some corn to outcompete them there horsetail ferns.  Of course we have lots of squirrels (they eat all the plums and hazelnuts), so we may get no corn out of the deal, but that’s ok.  And you know, if you let a geeky girl grow corn, she’s going to want to try out the traditional First Nations companion planting “Three Sisters” system, so of course she’s also going to plant beans and squash.  I only like some squash, and I’m the only one in the family who can tolerate it, so we’ll see how that goes.

Today I made a special trip out to Ladner (I LOVE the new South Fraser Perimeter Road - it only takes 30 minutes to get there!) to get seeds from West Coast Seeds’ retail store.  And since I was going out that way, I found a lady on Craigslist who was selling old hay cheap, which I’ll use for mulch between the rows. (Straw would be better but I can’t find any.)  Of course I only have a sedan, so I put one bale in the trunk and one in the back seat.  Note to self: if transporting hay inside a vehicle, it’s probably best to completely wrap up the bale rather than just cover the seat with a tarp, or else you get hay *everywhere*.

I decided to go with the Triplesweet Honey Select Corn.  Then I’ll grow some Purple Peacock beans with them at the front (some attempt at curb appeal), and Scarlet Runners towards the back.  Then pumpkins (mostly for carving) all along the top of the retaining wall next to the sidewalk, Kabocha along the back near the house, Pattypans near the stairs and Spaghetti squash (for my low-carbing sister) along the property line.

I also got a new “Pot Maker” for making little seedling pots out of newspaper.  We have one but we gave it to the inlaws to use after we moved to our townhouse (and had no garden).  I could have got it back from them, but every time we go over there, elder Brother-in-Law gives us more of Husband-Man’s teenage boy stuff.  Bless elder Brother-in-Law for trying to declutter other family members’ stuff from his parents house (where he still lives with all his stuff), but we don’t have any more room for teenage boy stuff at the moment, so it was easier to just buy a new Pot Maker.

While we were down in the states for the Life is Good Unschooling Conference last week (it was a blast), I also picked up two Burpee’s self-watering seedling trays on clearance.  ($5 each!)  They come with little pellets of seed starting mix, and Kid 2 thoroughly enjoyed adding water to these to see them fluff up and fill the cells.  Here’s one all sown with corn on my table (well, the lid is on, so it just looks like a plastic square):

Pardon the mess on my kitchen table.  I suddenly discovered that I had to rearrange my kitchen (and basement and garage) to make this project happen.

I also made lots of pots, because these trays only have 16 cells each, and I had a lot of corn to grow in a hurry.  I decided to start the seedlings indoors because the ground’s not ready yet, and I don’t want to go to all that trouble only to have squirrels dig up the seeds before they sprout, and because our last few Junes have not been very warm.  I set up my new seedling storage system next to the back door using an Ikea Trofast unit that wasn’t being well-utilized in the basement, and discovered that the Trofast bins are perfect for putting all my newspaper pots in.

And that’s 98 seeds sown, in hopes of getting 96 plants.  That could be a lot of sweet corn… there might be a few corn boils in my future…

And in the backyard, I was going to cut down the rosebush by the back door because it’s a bit straggly and Emily is allergic to roses.  But it’s not very smelly.  And then it gave me this today:

 

It might have to stay...