Why I'm Afraid of My Garden

Though it looks like a jungle, this is half of my garden. The previous owner of our house Kiki was quite fond of the English garden look and left us with a rambling, rolling, growing, thriving, mystical garden that we have absolutely no idea how to maintain. Mama HandyMan gave us some easy advice... if you don't like it, pull it out. I've already taken out the Lamb's Ear (sorry but their fuzzy softness just creeped me out). And may take out the purply-blue-spiky-headed thingys (not its technical name) which oozes some sort of nectar and attracts hordes of ants. Like I mentioned before, I'm good at killing plants - I'm just not good at keeping them alive.

One thing I do like about the garden is that it's full of surprises. I don't know what flowers will pop up next. Kiki was a master Conductor and orchestrated a spring floral melody punctuated by bursts of forsythia, soft tinklings of tulips and bleeding hearts, and the fortissimo beats of narcissus, crocus, and many others. I can't wait to see what's in store for summer!

Gettin' Tipsy

Its Friday and that means I’m heading out to watch Sex & The City with 12 of my most favourite girlfriends which means we’ll be enjoying a few of these. I won’t imbibe too much ‘coz kitchen floor tiles are going in tomorrow. HandyMan and I have vacation all next week so we plan to finish up the kitchen (for now, until the cabinets come in) and start work on the deck. Oh, and get some rest somewhere in between too. Happy Friday!

Shop 'Til You Drop

I’ve got a bug. A shopping bug. And its hit me pretty hard in the past week. Thanks to the wonders of online shopping, I’ve picked up these little babies and saved myself about $500 in the process. (Yes, I realize that if I didn’t buy them in the first place I would have saved much more, but that’s beside the point ;) ). I’ve been a bit all over the place with my purchases:

Rohl Country Faucet for the kitchen. We saw this particular faucet at Elte, a very nice but very expensive store. We had considered getting this faucet (with its built-in LED light and cool styling, it hooked HandyMan right in) – but the pull down head wasn’t a sprayer. And a girl needs a sprayer in the kitchen! So we went with the Rohl one with separate sprayer. It has a good weight to it, all the Rohl reviews I read were positive, and its traditional but in a more unique design.

Pottery Barn Silk Dupioni drapes in Wheat for the living room. The price of two of these online was less than the price of one in the store! They are the same as the ones hanging in our dining room (yes, the ones I paid regular price for, grrr). With the living room open to the dining room, I thought it best to have a cohesive look and keep all the drapes the same.

Outdoor LED sconce by Progress Lighting. I’m really excited about this little light. Its an LED (so the longer life makes it eco-friendly) and the styling of it is consistent with the new house numbers. HandyMan was worried it would cast a bluey-cool light – but apparently you can get LEDs in a warm white light or cool white light. Who knew?

So that’s it for now. There’s a few more things on my wishlist but they’ll have to wait. I can’t wait to check the mailbox when I get home.

Summer Breeze

Can't you just feel the warm breeze wafting in... just lovely.

Shiny Happy Numbers

In a continuing effort to make our house stand out from the crowd, we installed our modern house numbers. They seem to be a hit with HandyMan's "groupies". [Sidenote: HandyMan has garnered quite a following among the 5- to 10-year olds girls living on our street. More than once, I'll be working somewhere in the house when I hear the girls on our back porch, asking HandyMan what he's doing in the kitchen. I guess the sight of a man wielding a powertool is attractive to females of all ages!] As one of the girls told HandyMan tonight, "I like your numbers. Everybody else's is just boring". Perfect...non-boring is just the look we're going for :)

Before and after:

5" Ribbon Deep numbers from WestOnLetters.com

Episode 6 1/2: Ditra Down

A mini-post on the progress we made on the kitchen last weekend. After filling the gaps in the floor with levelling cement, we put down a layer of modified thinset and then the Ditra. The Ditra is a membrane which is supposed to help prevent the tiles from cracking. Hopefully it will do its job. Next weekend, we'll apply another layer of thinset and then finally the floor tiles.

All PK'd Out

I must be getting old. HandyMan and I hosted Pecha Kucha Toronto Vol.2 on Friday night and we were so tired from the event that we spent the rest of the weekend recuperating. Who knew that organizing 10 speakers and editing some presentations would have such an effect? It was all worth it though. The event went off with only a few minor hitches to the enjoyment of a packed, standing room only crowd. HandyMan and I got to talk to the Mayor again and finally give him the Pecha “20x20” book put together by the worldwide Pecha Kucha organizers in Japan. His presentation from last year was featured, though it took an embarrassingly long few minutes to actually find the article (why, oh why, didn’t I just sticky-tab it :P) All in all, a great event. The presenters were interesting and diverse, the timings were spot on, and the videos ran as expected (whew). And the audio-visual technicians provided a nice surprise by projecting the presentations on the slanted massive walls of the Royal Ontario Museum's entry lobby. The ROM never looked so good ;)

A few images of the night:


Ok – we didn’t entirely put off the housework. Come back later and see pics of the fancy new modern house numbers!

Doors Open

Its going to be a beautiful weekend in Toronto - perfect sunny warm weather and the Doors Open Toronto event is happening! If you haven't heard of Doors Open, its your opportunity to walk through 150 of the city's most architecturally, socially and culturally significant buildings - some of which are normally closed to the public. Its something I look forward to every year and really is a great way to explore the city. To get you in the mood, join us at the opening night celebration tonight at the Royal Ontario Museum (itself a gem of a building!) where HandyMan and I host Vol.2. See who's on the roster here.


To see a full list of the buildings participating, click here. Here's a few pics some of buildings participating this year. From L to R: Swaminarayan Mandir, City Hall, Design Exchange, Distillery District, Flatiron building, Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, Commerce Court North, Toronto Botanical Garden.

The Great Outdoors

With the kitchen in full swing, HandyMan and I have started to turn our attention to the next room on the renovation list - the back deck. After we finish putting down the kitchen tile, we'll have a very long six-week wait until the custom kitchen cabinets arrive. What better way to spend that time that tackle another home reno project.

As I blogged about before, we want the back deck to have a breezy laidback vibe... think billowing striped curtains, a built-in banquette, beadboard ceiling, nice railing details, and everything swathed in white paint. Here's what we're working with:

It seems we may have to make more structural changes than originally planned. Part of this is driven by our neighbours (with whom we share a driveway lane) who plan on building their own deck this year. With two decks encroaching into the backyard space, we're a little worried that we won't have enough room to manoeuvre our car out of the laneway and into our garage. We had already planned to remove part of our gate and narrow the deck steps to make way for the new jumbo recycling and garbage bins that the City is issuing to all homeowners. The neighbours' deck plans just present another wrinkle. After HandyMan and I host our Pecha Kucha on Friday, our calendar will be clear to start drawing up some plans. In the meantime, here's a few more inspirational photos I'll be tucking into my notebook.

From L to R: This Old House; Southern Living; Southern Living; House Beautiful; Domino; Domino

Flickr fun

Flickr, the awesome photo sharing site, has recently added video uploading to its capabilities. Here's a cool little video of time-lapse photography of Toronto entitled "Monday afternoon / Bed time". If you search Flickr, I'm sure you'll find some cool photos and videos of your own city.

Video by RebootYourComputer, found via the Torontoist blog.

Episode 6: Keeping It Level

We've had a slow start on the flooring. I blame it on Mother Nature... the sun was shining and HandyMan and I were content to run some errands, do some gardening, enjoy some bbq, and mow the lawn. That meant though that we didn't get as much progress on the floor as hoped.

We picked up the tiles from Saltillo. Love that store (and so does Sarah; she almost always uses them for every episode). Love HandyMan's architect discount. Love RONA too. They were having a 15% off sale so we got a deal on the thinset. Not loving the dips in the subfloor. Turns out that the kitchen floor slopes near the threshhold to the dining room. If we left that as is, eventually any tile laid over top would crack. So we had to fix it with some levelling cement... notice I didn't say "self-levelling". Nooo, HandyMan and I figured we were handy enough to level it ourslves and save the $20 bucks. Were we successful? Ask me tomorrow when the cement dries :o\


We managed to figure out the floor pattern though. Initial thoughts were lay it in a 1/3 offset but that just ended up looking weird. We settled on 1/2 offset. Sounds easy right? But then we spent a good hour figuring where to start - center it on the dining room door? Hallway door? Middle of the room? Centered between the cabinets? Yes, that's how we'll do it. Here's a peek.


Tomorrow, two layers of thinset, the Ditra, and the tiles are going down. Wish us luck.

Relax

Its a long weekend here in Toronto and hopefully the rain will hold off and we get to enjoy some nice sunny Spring weather. I'll be up to my ears in floor tiles but do plan to take a break, sit out on my deck, enjoy a mango smoothie, and admire my abundant (yet quickly overgrowing) garden. Relax. That's the name of the game.

Moo

HandyMan and I made up some business cards in preparation for our upcoming event. Have you heard of Moo cards? I think they're the cutest things. You can upload your own pics or use some of their stock designs like I did with this batch. The pics or designs go on the front and six lines of text go on the back.




There's so many things you can do with your Moos. We even used some as favour tags for our wedding. If I was an interior designer, I'd put different pics of rooms I'd done on them. Some Moos are so coveted they get traded... like baseball cards... but without the stick of bubblegum ;)

Design Sleuthing

Okay, I love love love Canadian House & Home magazine - but I hate their website! It's confusing; it's hard to find useful articles; and generally, the layout is not user friendly at all. I've often wondered how such a superb publication can translate so poorly onto the web.

Well, it turns out that things aren't as bad as I thought... they're just ridiculously misplaced. I recently signed up for the House & Home newsletter and found a teeny tiny link to the House & Home photo galleries. Finally! Here is all the inspirational content I was looking for. A click through the galleries will show you some great images like these:

Which begs the question, why would you "hide" your photo galleries?? Heck, even using the Search function on the website won't bring up the links. I think I'll have to write the Editor on this one.

P.S. For the kitchen obsessed, click here to see the super-secret Kitchen galleries ;o)

Episode 5: Return of the Room

She's baa-aack. The kitchen, that is. Drywall is up and the subfloor is down. Let's take a look at how far we've come.




Ta-da! Yes, I know... there's not that much to look at. But since HandyMan and I did most of this work ourselves, I'm pretty darned pleased. We've finished painting (you can see the sample swatch beside the sliding door frame). Next up: floor tile installation this weekend. Here's a closer look at the palette... an olive taupe porcelain tile, calcutta marble backsplash, kashmir white granite and matte black oval knobs. The reno just keeps chug-chug-chugging along...