some scenery

This is some scenery from the last two days. Our friends Joel and Jocelyn are out visiting from Victoria. They took the train all the way across Canada. It sounds like an amazing trip - definitely the way to go if you can swing it. We took them on a walking tour of the town today but had to cut it a little short due to all the hail. Yeah...hail!

There's some before shots. And here's some after!






That last one is a shot of Jai jumping for joy.

It's REALLY windy here tonight, and the lights just started to dim a little, so I'm going to turn the computer off. We'll post more later, tho.
P.S. We got that couch for $149!!!! That's probably why the legs are too wobbly!

wainscotting ahoy

We've just about finished our first room!







It took us most of the day to get the crown molding up. What a task! Especially when you only have hand tools! It worked out pretty good in the end, though. Tomorrow it just needs one more coat of paint on the moldings, and then it's done! We'll be putting furniture in it tomorrow as well, so I'll post a before and after shot, just so you can realize the true immensity of the task we are about to complete.
Other than that, we have not much news. We've been getting some pretty good mail in the last two days - thanks Mom and Grandma! I guess this is as close to a letter as I'll be doing for now. So "Hi!" I really love hearing all your news.
It was cold here today, hovering around zero, but it was also sunny and crisp. It was actually really nice, the night sky was just beautiful right after sunset. I had to go out and buy some halloween candy, it's starting to feel like Halloween around here. They have a thing called the Pummpkin People that's mostly in Kentville, but seems to be spreading through the valley. People seem to really have fun setting up big tableaus. It gives us lots of good ideas for next year! This is the only one we actually have a picture of so far:


And here's some pictures of Webster and Peanut. As you can see, Webster has gained a little bit of weight, although he would probably tell you it's just fluff...

Hello! Today was a really long day! We drove to Dartmouth and spent almost five hours in the Home Depot. I know...yikes! We didn't have too much trouble finding it - thanks to driving past it with Mom. We had lots of landmarks like "that's where Mom almost had to turn left 'cause she was in the wrong lane" :) Just teasing. We spent almost $1200, although a good portion of that was gift certificates - thanks, everybody that contributed. We got lots of fun things, some wallpaper, some tiles, some flooring, a battery-operated chainsaw. You know, just stuff. All good stuff. And a giant ladder (though still not long enough to reach our very high roof!)


We'll post pictures of stuff as we get to use it.

Yesterday we drove to the base of the North Mountain to meet a woodturner named Steve. He was really cool and really nice. He does all sorts of large, functional bowls, as well as some nice decorative stuff. He had an ad in the Buy&Sell that he had 2"&3" live-edge dry eastern maple. We bought eight pieces off him, and he gave us a great deal. I was so excited about one of the pieces. I had to cut a bit off and plane it up to see how it looked. BEAUTIFUL!



We took a short walk over the bridge yesterday to go to the pub for lunch. Jai had Deep-Fried Pepperoni pieces, and I had an amazing chicken stirfry salad. Yum! I think Jai feels like he may as well be in heaven if the local pub has a dish called Deep-Fried Pepperoni. Here's some shots from the bridge of the Annapolis River...

Sanding, sanding, sanding. That was the major event of the day. Jai rented a big floor sander, and fixed the library floor. Picture this...originally there was ugly, stained, stinky brown carpet. Under that was ugly, stained linoleum, well stuck down onto underlay. The underlay was well nailed in a 6-inch grid, and then there was a layer of a tar-like substance under that. Under all that...gorgeous hardwood!



Nice work Jai!!!!!



Meanwhile, I was driving up to Berwick to have a guy look at my scrollsaw. He replaced the fuse and it worked fine. Oops, we both looked at the fuse and decided it couldn't be that. Anyway, he was very nice about it, and didn't charge me anything. It's too late, though, I've already done hours of research on what to get as a replacement saw. I've decided on the Excalibur EX30, if I can get my hands on one. It's all in the works as we speak. My first real professional-quality tool. I don't know if you can tell or not, but I'm pretty excited.


And part of the reason I can afford to entertain these daydreams is that the developer of the condos they are putting in behind our house has tentively agreed to buy the back 45 feet of our lot. Supposedly they want it for green space. Hopefully that's true, we should be getting an official offer around the end of November. He also said we can take whatever we want out of the three buildings that will be coming down. There is some real nice timber there, so we are going to do a scavenging mission one of these days! These are two of the buildings:

ottoman blue?

Hello! We feel like we got a lot done today.
This morning we painted our upstairs room. The colour turned out to be a little more green than we were expecting (considering it's called "Ottoman Blue") but once it was dry we decided we like it a little better, and I think it's starting to grow on us. What do you think?

We're putting wainscotting on the bottom half of the walls (no, we didn't forget to paint that part!) Plus the ceiling will have crown molding up, so all the roughness from pulling the wallpaper down will disappear.
This afternoon we picked up a cord of wood from a guy on the South Mountain. It was our first time on the South Mountain - very pretty, but not as nice (in my opinion) as the North Mountain. We got a full cord of apple wood that was supposedly dry, but some of those pieces weigh a ton, so some of it is definitely still soaked. It took us two trips in the truck, and then we spent some time stacking it nicely, and picking out pieces to turn or resaw. It was pretty fun!



And we found two knots that we thought made a pretty good face:

Oh crappy days...
I started out with an appointment with the EI people to fill out MORE forms - an hour drive each way! Then a bank apointment, then painting. Then my scrollsaw broke. I was using it and it just slowed and then stopped. It's still under warranty, but I had to find the receipt........



Somewhere in there....





Amazingly, I did, but it was a LOT of work. And in the process I found a few more moldy things, like this book that I had been saving to read when I needed something really good. I've been saving it for almost a year now, but it ended up with a very sad fate, I just couldn't save it.





The night was better, though. Jai made pizza, and we went to the curling club sign-up. The people there were really nice, and they put our names down for when two other people come in who need team members, and they are going to give us a free tutorial. They said no one would mind if we totally suck, as long as we don't sign up for Friday nights. And we could get a key, and practice whenever we want. Jai downloaded a tutorial on the computer, so we feel a little less stupid. Our lesson is a week tomorrow, I'll let you know how it goes. It looks pretty fun!




That's Jai making gourmet pizzas from scratch, and a shot of our local video store, owned and operated by a man named Peter, of which we are both proud members. (Though we haven't actually rented anything yet) He's got a pretty good selection, but NO tv shows, so we'll have to get our fix another way. Hmmm...black market tv?

Hey Everybody! We got lots done today on the homefront!
Check out the wallpaper we just put up in the bedroom:

Beauty!
Plus we primed two rooms and Jai scraped all the moldings in one.



Look at that door - can you believe it's original? Tomorrow we actually get to put some paint on the walls. It's been days and days of sanding and filling and priming and filling and sanding and priming. Hooray for colour.
I took a picture today of our mailbox looking empty and forlorn.

Look at all those reflections, you can just imagine it echoing. We have so much cool mail on the way, every day we have such high hopes. Oh well, maybe tomorrow. Tomorrow for sure!

Just kidding about the wallpaper, by the way. Or am I?

I just got off the phone with everyone at Grandma and Grandpa's house. Hello everyone there, if you're still reading this.


This view is about a 30-second walk from our house. There is a really pretty horse farm just on the other side of the river. We get all sorts of bluejays in our yard, it's so neat. There's a whole family of them, and they like to congregate in our big maple and have big, noisy conversations. I haven't succeeded in getting a good picture of one of them, but I will keep trying. I put in an order for a suet-cake holder, and some suet at the local Home Hardware. It should be here on Thursday. Hopefully the jays will like the suet, and we'll be able to get them nice and close to the house for photo opportunities. The other day I saw five of them sitting on our neighbour Pearl's balcony. She has a giant sunflower that's all gone to seed, and they take turns eating out of it.
Pearl gave us a hot tip on a good bookstore today as we were heading out of the house, so of course we had to check it out. We never would have found it without her, but it's like the perfect bookstore. I feel like I can really settle in here now.


This is our quince harvest. Since neither of us felt like making jelly, and no one could think of anything else to do with them, they all went in the compost bin. Maybe next year . . . if anyone knows something good to do with quinces, let us know!

Hello, well we're still working on the same two rooms. The soon-to-be t.v. room is ready for Primer now, so we'll be doing that tomorrow. We're both really looking forward to seeing it primed - it will really look like something got done. The library was ready for primer, but we decided to take off the moldings where the bookcases are going to go, and now we have to drywall where the baseboard used to be. The moldings throughout the house are almost 11" high, and very, very old. It took Jai most of the day to get them off without wrecking them, as we want to put them on the bases of the bookcases. We also ripped out the rest of the floor in the library, and I made some sawhorses so we could cut up the plywood into pieces that will fit in the woodstove. I spent most of the day getting the bedroom organized and the clothes put away. It's still ugly in here, but it's not messy any more and the computer is off the floor, so it's a little more comfortable to work on. I also learned that if you do anything outside on Monday afternoons you are liable to be visited by both the Avon lady (who seemed very nice) and the Jehovas Witness ladies (who were also nice, and luckily afraid of my power saw.)
Here are some wedding pictures that we never got up:




These were sent to us by Robyn, our wedding photographer as advance photos. She sent some other ones, too, but I won't put them all up yet. Needless to say we are incredibly excited to see the rest. She did an amazing job. We're hoping they'll be in the mail this week - one of our favourite parts of the day is checking the mail. We have to walk to the post office, which is not exactly a hardship, as you can see it if you look out the dining room window. We have a little key for a little box, and the box has a little window in it, so you can see as you're walking up if there's anything in there. It's so much fun.

Action at the Auction

Today we went to our first auction. It was really fun, but the weather was really miserable, cold and wet and windy. We tried to tough it out to the bitter end, but we couldn't quite do it. Most of the cool stuff was already gone anyway. We bid on a lot of different things, and mostly succeeded in making them more expensive for other people (which has a certain kind of satisfaction to it all on it's own.) We did, however, win a couple of items. We got a big, ceramic bowl ($5,) a big metal cabinet for the shop ($5,) and a matching side chair, arm chair, and bench ($100 for all three.)

























There were so many cool things, and I couldn't believe how cheaply they went for! Some beautiful peices of furniture went for over a thousand dollars, but most of it was well under $300 - some people got beautiful antique dressers and sideboards for like $60! What fun! I told Jai we need a bigger house already!
Yesterday we got to know our little town a little better. We met with the town planner and the recreation planner, and they gave us some great ideas for things to do to get involved. There's a lot going on around here. Plus we walked around a little more. I didn't have my camera when we went over the old railbridge, but it was really neat. It's still just railway ties, so you can see the river passing under your feet as you walk across. It feels like something out of "Lean on Me." We also found all three cemetaries in town. One has about ten graves in it, and you can only get to it from the back of the liquor store parking lot, and the other two are much bigger. The farthest one was breathtaking! (not literally) (sorry, for some reason I couldn't resist!)




There's these two crazy trees that are like the guardians of the cemetary, you've never seen anything like it, they're so bizarre, and I din't really get a picture that captured the feeling you get.





Apparently there are graves there from the 1600's. Also in the last couple of days the trees, which were already very pretty, have notched it up to spectacular - sorry Mom, you just missed it. It's almost a sensory overload to take a walk around town, everything is so pretty.