Catching up…Renovations, Painting and Birthdays…

It is funny how I don’t mind so much being the cause of a celebration when it is my birthday…of course, I wasn’t the cause of my birthday, really…so it isn’t like a vernissage for my paintings…where I am the cause of that event…this seems to make sense for me!

We have all been working on a different type of creativity since last week! For my birthday, Little Tammy (good friend and my younger daughter’s adopted second mother), decided to help us paint and organize the house…first floor for my birthday in February and second floor for my younger daughter’s birthday in April. We bought what used to be a duplex…two approx 800 square feet apartments. We cut a hole in the floor and put in stairs (really neat stairs built by Cariño’s brother). They are ‘floating’ stairs and he cut designs out of the metal beam…birds, flowers, shapes…they are beautiful!

This is the backbone of the stairs just before they were installed last summer...













Here they are installed...the cats like them too!


















Each apartment had a huge kitchen…I use the upstairs one as my studio…it used to be the only thing I liked about the house – but now I might get to like the house more because of all the work we did with Little Tammy! The downstairs kitchen had the lower half of it covered with this plastic stuff…really ugly and painted bright orange…there was no covering it because of a metal lip at the top – so Cariño peeled it all off and, under Little Tammy’s direction, we put up wainscotting – it goes about four and a half feet up the wall with a strip of moulding on top…during this process we found out how very crooked our house is! This part of it is over 100 years old and nothing is straight – but I think it has sunk some as well!

The bundles of wainscotting came in lengths of 8', so we cut them all in half and made adjustments from there...the one wall went down at quite an angle and we had to fill in the bottom with a horizontal piece of the boards...














This whole undertaking with Little Tammy was a huge job…made even more difficult because ‘we’ (Cariño will say it is me) have too much stuff…our last place was quite a lot bigger and had a nice big basement to store (hide) things in…this house has a scary basement that I won’t put anything much in (I certainly won’t go down there) and is smaller all round! So we are still dealing with the fact that a lot of stuff doesn’t have a home yet (even though we moved in almost three years ago – I have mentioned before that I don’t play house very well!) and we didn’t have the space to move things from room to room as we worked…so there was very little room to move around in!

Here are some 'during' pictures showing how congested it was for working...




















































I complained about being woken up early and about how much of a slave driver Little Tammy was…but it really was great to have her here, heading up this project! She would have wondered what was wrong if I didn’t complain! I complain at the cottage when she wakes me up early too…we go sit by the water and have coffee …I do like that early morning quiet time before the kids all wake up and the day begins…I just wish we didn’t have to get up early for it! I am not a morning person – I’m more of a night owl…

Here is our fearless leader (and merciless slave driver) Little Tammy...we love her dearly!!!


















I don’t really have any “before” shots…except this one…you can see the half orange walls…now I have nothing against orange…but not as such a prominent colour in my house! It doesn’t go with anything I have…my nice wood furniture didn’t look good with it at all!














Now the kitchen is a nice white on the wainscotting and a beautiful rich red on the top…it looks like a totally new room!




























We didn’t get to the whole downstairs, and we still have some sorting…our bathroom needs some major repair work (we did know we were buying a fixer-upper!) before we waste any time painting and we didn’t get to the bedroom…that’s all the downstairs consists of…

But we did get to Cariño’s office/living room…it is now a happy yellow…it is quite a deep yellow…like dandelions…














Little Tammy came on Thursday and on Saturday we stopped work early to go out to Oma’s for a birthday dinner for me! There were 11 of us! Little Tammy, Cariño, me, my two daughters and their beaus and Cariño’s brother, his better half and Cariño’s sister came from Montreal…and Oma, of course! We had lots of good food and wine…it was wonderful! Forgot to take any pictures though!!! I had no idea the Montreal crew were coming – when they arrived I had been upstairs working on a computer (I had to fix a computer over the weekend in between nailing, gluing, painting and cleaning!) and Cariño called me down…I walked into the kitchen and was handed a glass of champagne…what a lovely surprise that was!!!

I was spoiled with good company, food, wine and presents! Oma made me a felted tea cosy, elder daughter got me some neat artsy and pottery magazines, a gift card for Chapters and book bag and my younger daughter, who tries to say she isn’t artistic (while her sister, brother and I am) painted me a wonderful abstract as well as getting me a journal, mini easel and Mom book!

Here is a picture of my parachute tea cosy...Oma also made a neat card that fit inside of it with a poem of hers as well as some parachute quotes...














I am very impressed by my painting from my younger daughter...I love it!


















So…I haven’t been blogging much lately…but now you know why…I’ve been busy!