Do Magnets Stick to Your Pots?

Refrigerators, stoves, dishwashers…oh my! This is my status on facebook tonight. At first it was supposed to be funny, kinda like lions, tigers and bears…oh my! But reading it over, it’s started to freak me out. When I picked appliances the first time it was no big deal – I found what I wanted and bought it. We had an appliance allowance from the builder (and an amazing friend) so it made things a little way less expensive. I was able to get a beautiful Jenn-Air fridge and fancy Jenn-air stove and an awesome GE Profile dishwasher. This time I have a budget, sort of. Practical me knows how much I want to spend but spendy me wants to triple it.

As an aside here, I took a interest inventory test at work and I got the results back this week. Culinary Arts is my second highest interest (first is taxes and accounting – I am going to be a cooking accountant!) I’d be investing in my interest if I got the super cool appliances – some people pick photography, others pick camping, me I pick my kitchen. Now I just have to convince Hubby of this!

I am like a crack addict when I go to an appliance store and I am sure the sales people see me coming. The sales guy starts in on the amazing benefits of an induction cook top. How it cooks like gas with even and immediate heat but is electric; how it’s cool to the touch (awesome if you have kids you know!) And on and on. Practical me says: but won’t I have to get special pots?(meanwhile spendy me says pots smots, you could use a new set!!) Oh no he replys, if magnets stick to your old pots, you won’t have a problem. So the first thing I do when I get home? Run to the cupboard and pull out a pot to see if a magnet will stick – NO it doesn’t. Looks like I will have buy new pots! Looks like we aren’t getting an induction range.

I am hoping that appliance wholesaler that the builder works with will come through with some good deals but I am not holding my breath!

Architectural Upgrades

Here is a list of the other upgrades we are going with…

1)Fully insulating the garage
2)Moving the basement window from the back of the house to the left side
3)Adding a side door to the mudroom
4)Moved the dishwasher to beside the sink
5)Sound proofing the laundry room
6)Switched up the laundry room and added extra space to the walk-in closet

Here is what its going to look like:



The only one thing I am now thinking about it that there is a lot of doors in that one section of the hall as our master has double doors that will be to the right of the laundry. Hubs and I figure if it is too doory we can always switch up the master after the fact – closing in the sides and making one wider door. I guess we will see in 8 months!

Master Bath Part II

I think I have kept anyone who is interested in suspense long enough. We got the pricing back for the master bathroom! Here is a break down….

1)Making the tub smaller and moving it to its new location $200
2)Shower with the Kalia base, custom glass on two walls and ceramic on 2 walls, moved to new location $4900
3)The Camil Tomlin Flow shower, moved to new location $2800
4)Standard shower with Klera doors, moved to new location $400
5)Double Vanity with bank of drawers $1200

We decided on….drum roll please….options 1, 2 and 5!!! YES I am getting the custom shower!!! I think the new bathroom is going to rock!! There is no way we could have redone the bathroom for $6300 after the fact so thank you builder for pricing it right!!

We are still working out the colour choices. I am not sure what route we want to go. I found a really nice white tile with a fine grey strip running through it – I was thinking that on the floor with a white tile on the tub surround, a brown/black or black coloured vanity with a white counter and then a dark charcoal colour on the walls of the shower. It sounds like a mish-mash though…

I think I should just go with this....



…hubby might object though!

I’ll keep you posted on the colour choices. If anyone has any advice, or pictures they want to share, let me know, i would love to see them for inspiration!!

SOLD!

As I write the word, I am still in disbelief. It has been quite a month! I will start at the beginning with the first piece of news…the house is SOLD!!! That’s right, come June 24th we will no longer own the little brown house. What is most interesting about this piece of news is that it wasn’t even for sale. That’s right. NOT.FOR.SALE. Not on grapevine, or with an agent, nowhere near being on the market. In fact, the day before all this came to light, I was preparing to blog about our stager and our staging process. (I will still do this; I just won’t have any insight as to whether or not it worked for us because we didn’t get that far in the process!)

So how does this happen? I give credit to the wonderful world of social networking. I frequent (and I use that term lightly as I have not been on in almost a month) a web site called www.buildinghomes.ca It’s a resource for those building new construction homes in Canada. There is a message board specifically for those building homes in Ottawa and someone was asking questions about our area, and mentioned how they liked the same model as we have but didn’t like where the builder was currently building. So I piped in with my 2 cents – “Hey we are putting ours on the market in a couple of months, let me know if you would like more details” sure enough, they messaged me back almost immediately interested in our place. My son and i were going out of town that weekend (and Brian was sick) so we put off the viewing until the next weekend. And then it started: they came, they saw, we negotiated, we agreed, they inspected, and we’re sold! I make it sound a lot quicker and a lot less stressful - all that probably took a good and very busy month.

Oh yes and before I forget (haha – kidding) the second piece of news is…I am expecting!!! Our second baby is due August 14th (thank GOD its not anywhere near our closing date!) This is the other reason I have been delinquent with my postings – I’ve been absolutely exhausted (and sick but that’s another story).

The third bit of news relates to the new house’s master ensuite, but I will post that in another post!

The Master Bath

I am not a fan of the master bath as it designed in our new house.



My 2 main reasons:
1) too much of the floor space is taken up by a massive corner tub. Neither me nor my husband are bath people. The massive tub we have right now has only been used once, by my son when I got the bright idea he should have a bath in there. It took about 20 mins for it to fill his usual amount of water (about 3”) and of course it was cold by the time he got in it. As well, the side of the tub is too high for me to reach over. It was not a pleasant experience for either of us.
2) We cant get a double vanity in there without upgrading the shower. We had sort of already planned on upgrading the shower but I don’t want the vanity to butt up against the expensive glass wall, it kind of defeats the purpose.

I have talked to a few people on the tub situation, because I feel like if I could solve that, it would make things easier. One main question was raised like: do you really need a tub? My rebuttle: Is it going to affect resale? Which got me thinking, do you really need a tub in an ensuite if you have a tub in another bathroom? Some said yes, some said no. We kicked around the idea of having one massive luxury shower with a couple of shower heads, and body sprays. We also thought about having a stand alone tub. Unfortunately I think a stand alone tub needs to be seen – it’s a thing of beauty after all. In the end there was no place in the bathroom we could logically put it for it to be seen.

In the end I went to our builder’s supplier and talked to one of the associates there. She was helpful in coming up with a plan maximize the space in the bathroom. I was also able to pick out a couple of options for the shower.

1) a Kalia base (which is a solid surface base that looks way nicer than its acrylic counter part) 2 custom glass walls and 2 tiled walls
2) the Camel/Tomlin Flow shower


The re-design is more of a reconfigure. We went with a smaller tub and switched the shower and vanity. Check it out:



We will now wait until we get pricing to make our decision. Although I am sure that we have already exceeded our budget for this room just in these changes alone. For fun, here is my order of preference*:

1) Bathroom reconfiguration with all standard options.
2) Double vanity
3) Awesome shower
4) Upgrade the tile
5) Upgrade the vanity colour

*Note: these are today’s preferences….LOL

Keep your fingers crossed for us!

We did it!!

It has been just over a week, and I am still in a state of disbelief! We bought a house!! It’s another new construction, but the same builder that built our current place. It’s in a different neighbourhood though, in the west of the city, Stittsville to be exact. I am not sure about most people when they move, but this is not a decision we took lightly. We did our research, found the lot, put a deposit down and then backed out because we still weren’t sure. We then spent the next several months, going to open houses (3 months x 4 weekends/month x 5 houses average per weekend = 60 houses) Some we visited twice or three times (not included in that count). But nothing ever compared to this place. So why not just get it then…well two main reasons factored into this doubt: 1) Its far 2) it’s close to the dump.

Its far....

When we were telling our family and close friends the happy news, a couple of them immediately shot it down saying: “Stittsville eh?...wow… that’s… far” or “Rush Hour traffic is going to be hell” and my personal favourite: “I hope you don’t expect me to visit you ALL THE WAY out there” . Whoa – I didn’t know we were moving to Mars. I guess that is a few less people that we will have to invite to our house warming party! It’s not really that far – from Blackburn Hamlet it is about 36 minutes door to door. To put that in perspective, it’s about 28 minutes from there to our current place. Yes the distance is greater, but the streets you drive on are faster. So it evens out. We have actually timed the drive, and it’s true, it is just 36 minutes (we played fair and went the speed limit too) While it is far from some, it is close to a lot more. There are grocery stores, shops and restaurants within walking distance. We have lots of family and friends who live in the area so if we need help with the little one, its just short drive away. This is HUGE for us. If I am late from work one day, I can get help rather than stressing about it until I get to the daycare and then having to pay late fees – I never wanted to be that parent. It will also be nice for our son to grow up closer to his cousin. We might even be able to look into a nanny share!!

Its close to the dump....

Yes it is. I don’t know what else to say here. This is something we were really worried about in the beginning. It’s the reason we pulled the plug the first time around. But after talking to some neighbours and my dad doing some research on the wind patterns, we hope it won’t be too big of an issue.

While it kind of sounds like I am trying to justify our decision to move, I am not. We are really happy and excited!!! And those who don’t think it’s a good idea: butt out and be happy for us!!

The house will be in the north-western corner of the subdivision. It is a little pocket of about 20 homes. You have a cross over a bridge and through a bit of forest to get there. Our place currently backs onto a lot of 6 acres that is for sale and is zoned residential. But word on the street is that the price is too high and therefore unusable for developers. So for now we back on to a forest. It’s a bit of country in the city!!! The house will look like this:

Ok...i am back.....

So I was at a Christmas party this weekend and my girlfriends were asking about my blog. Why I haven't been writing anything lately - I guess it’s because I really didn’t have anything to say.
I have been busy adjusting to my new life, a mom, wife and homeowner that lives in the 'burbs (if you can call it that, I prefer the middle of nowhere). It hasn’t been a particularly hard adjustment, just one where there seems to be no time for anything except that.
I can tell you, that I am going to try to make more time for blogging as 2011 will bring with it a lot of changes. They are big ones - I know, I have insider knowledge! Stay tuned, I will hopefully be able to write about the first one on Wednesday!