Not Progress

Some friends of ours, that were into showing Alpacas, moved to the city. They sold most of the animals they had and my husband bought some tools and a few other things from them. The other day he went out to their farm and came home with these.

We now have seven Alpacas in our yard. What we are going to do with them is beyond me. I guess they will be fun to pet, for the many kids who come visit.  Did I mention the my husband went out of town the day after these made an appearance in my yard? Seriously, I am not fond of taking care of my daughters horses and now this!

I am pretty sure this in not considered progress. One step forward two steps back. If you would like to adopt one let me know.

Love You More

Okay, remember my reason for doing this? Progress is progress no matter how small. 


So yesterday I decided to go down and tackle my dungeon, because I do that occasionally. I was cleaning the basement and I went into my son's bathroom, a place I usually avoid. I decided it needed a mother's touch. After giving it a good cleaning, it still needed something more. I looked around my house and found a painting I had bought a while back and hadn't found a place for. Now, when I bought it, I must admit, that a bathroom is not what I had in mind, but to be truthful, I don't think I really had a place in mind, i just liked what it said. 

So here it is, hung in the bathroom. That wall still needs something more, I am not sure what. I do have a hand towel ring that will be hung on the wall over the sink that will help a little, but it still looks a bit bare. I will have to figure something out but it is better then it was. For some reason the painting appears so small in this picture, it is actually a fair size. If you click on the picture and make it bigger it looks better, but for some reason it is so much better when I just go look at it in the bathroom. Maybe a cute towel rack underneath it with hanging towels? An update to follow.


Last night when my son went into the bathroom to take a shower he yelled out the door to me, "I love you most". Made me happy!

Bad Contractors

So what do you do when you have paid somebody a $10,000.00 deposit to finish your house, and they spent your money, but haven't done anything? Oh, wait, he did do something. He took all our custom made doors and trim so that he could stain them to match the existing doors and trim and then never brought them back again. 


He promised me in October when we hired him that he would have our house finished for Christmas. He took our cheque and promised he would be back that weekend to start. Suffice it to say, he did not show. And when he finally did show after many phone calls, he told me I was panicking, that there was not that much work to do, and assured me once again that it would be done by Christmas. It was not! Not even close! What he did do was stain all my wood yellow, after I begged him not to. Then have to get a new stain that would cover up the yellow and for all I know it all looks horrible. But we can't even see if it can be fixed because we still don't have it.


He was supposed to bring them back today at 6 pm, sharp, he said, it is now 6:45 and he has not shown. The only reason he even talked to us is because I threatened to get the police involved and my husband had to go knock on his door. He was recommended to us by the guy who made the doors. So hard to find good trades people, when you do, keep their numbers.


What I should do is start a list of people you should never ever call no matter how desperate you are.


If that guy does show up today, I am going to take his picture and post it on here so you can see what a tradesperson looks like who has no pride, integrity, honour or any other morals or ethics. Yup reserving a spot for his picture right underneath this.

Getting a Roof.

When we finally  started our reno, my husband gave me about one day notice. He came home with a framer one day, and the next day they were ripping off roof. I panicked. "You said you wanted it done, what are you complaining about." Was the answer to my pleading for more time to move things from upstairs. 


The kids and I grabbed things as fast as we could and brought what we could down to the main level. Some of the furniture ended up being moved off the second level floor, which was now our roof, with a Bobcat. Fun times. I wish I had been blogging while we were doing it, I could have got some great pictures. 

It was very weird walking up your stairs to be standing outside. The rectangle hole in the floor is the old stair well. 


Anyways the Reno had begun. No permits, and an old plan that no longer worked because we had now ripped off the entire second storey of our home. So I called our designer, told him what my husband was doing, and as quick as we could we got new plans drawn up for the new second floor.

This is a picture of the only addition we were going to do, minus the rest of the second floor that was not supposed to be ripped off to begin with.

Walls being built. The guy with no shirt is the framer my husband hired to help, everyone else you will see in these pictures are either, my husband, my brothers, or my sons. I found out later that the framer was smoking pot every time he took a break, maybe why he did not think to move beds out of the way of the down pour that ensued when he removed tarps from our roof in the wake of a storm. May also be the reason he did not notice the storm coming.

Walls going up, the guy in the grey t-shirt on the left would be my husband.

Walls are up and now the roof trusses are going up. Notice the blue tarp on the left hand corner, that was all we had to protect us from the rain, and we did get rain. It poured in to my cabinets in the kitchen, as well as many other places.

More  trusses going up. Even the tarps need some sort of support.

The stairs going up to the second level were the stairs that used to go down to the basement from the kitchen. They were put to good use for months during our reno.

I guess I never got a picture of the framing complete before we has some sort of waterproofing on it. It stayed covered in tarps for weeks, which seemed like months, until my husband, who is a roofer by trade, had time and a break in the weather to get a waterproof membrane down.

Framing complete, back side view. Notice the nice waterproof membrane on there. No more floods. Yay! 

All the framing done and waterproofed roof. Notice the tarps now on the ground. The great thing about this is that that waterproof membrane is still on under our shingles, so, our roof should not leak, ever. 


Once my husband decided he was going to rip off the whole second floor, I decided that we should then have a second floor deck with doors in all the bedrooms. Easy exit if there is ever a fire and nice place to enjoy in the summer. That is why you there are doors framed in.

View from the front. You can see the old roof line if you look to the left of the chimney. The chimney now needs to be built up higher, one of the things that still needs to be done.

Drawing of how the house is to look nee it is done. To get the house to this point only took a little over a month. We started June 3 and the above picture was taken July 7. Not bad, really. That included rip off and and all. It lulled me into a false security that this was going to actually get done. 

The Beginning

In September of 2005, we moved into our new home. We knew from the start we wanted to make a few changes. What I didn't know, is that my husband was going to turn my whole world upside down and inside out. A reno that my husband said would take 6 months is still not complete.


Now to be fair to my husband, we did not start in 2005, as we were going through an audit by revenue Canada and did not have the money. We started in June of 2008 and here it is almost four years later and here I sit in my unfinished home. I have decided to blog about it because I am hoping that it will motivate me to get things done. Even if they are small things. Progress is progress no matter how small.

I cannot find a picture of my house when we first bought it, I will add one later, but this is a picture, taken from the driveway, before my world got turned upside down. This picture was taken after we added a deck and replaced a picture window with the double patio doors you can see here.


To begin with the plan was very simple. The upstairs had three dormer bedrooms and a bathroom. Because they were dormer rooms there was six feet of attic crawl space on two sides of each room. The back bedroom was very small and we did not really have a master bedroom. The lower level of the house had a small bedroom and office off of the living room that had nothing over it. We decided to take out the back side of the roof and the roof over the office and bedroom to crate a bigger back bedroom and a walk in closet and bathroom turning the front bedroom into a master with an en suite. Simple, right?

This is the north side of the house, here after referred to as the back side of the house. The window on the upper level is the bedroom we wanted to make a little bigger and the man is standing on there roof over the small bedroom and office of the lower level. 

This is a view of the back of the house before we started. 

All going according to plan. Roof ripped off and getting ready for new addition.

Roof off over small downstairs bedroom (my bedroom at the time) and office. Back side of roof removed to continue wall of back bedroom and make room bigger. First snag. We got caught in a hail storm and flooded the two down stairs bedrooms. Window under upstairs room was also a bedroom. The framer had shown up as I was leaving. He started taking the tarp, my husband had put over the roof off. "Is that wise," I asked, " there is a forecast for rain." "Don't worry," he assured me, I will see it coming from a long way off.  Famous last words. My mattress was water logged. However frustrating this was, don't even get me started, you would think he would at least have moved beds out from under the water pouring in, I soon got used to it as it was only the first of many floods to come.

New wall for new en suite and walk-in closet up. Things were going pretty good. Then my husband realized the bedroom that was going to be the new master bedroom was sort of built in a box. there was a 2x8 box around the bottom of it that was held together with metal cables. Any rooms adjoining it would have to be built 12 inches higher up or have a dividing board between them. Not ideal on any level. Especially since that new wall going up was going to add six feet to the bedroom, that used to be attic crawl space, and that six fee would have to be 12 inches higher then the rest of the room. My Husband thought about this for a bit and decided the only thing to do would be to knock the whole top of the house off and start over. 


That is how simple turned into chaos.


I had a small panic attack, begged him not to do this, especially since the framer he had hired to help him told me that the rip off alone would take until Christmas. My husband assured me the guy was crazy. The whole thing was going to take no more then six months.  I finally relented (like I had a choice) and we went ahead.

My husband chalk marked the outside of the house where the main floor ended and second floor started used a saw to cut along it and started removing the rest of the roof and pushing out walls. Keep in mind we never moved out of this house. 

If you think this looks scary, think of how I felt, living right underneath it all. That's right, we have no roof, and it is June in Southern Alberta!


Well this is how it started. Stick with me and I will show you how it progressed.