our new place

so a few people have been asking me about our new place.

Some great things about it:

-It is not as small as I feared
-our bedroom is huge, and our king size bed fits in easily
-the attic playroom is delightful and features a secret floorboard for hiding cool things (hopefully nothing valuable...)
-the kitchen is workable, especially with the generous loan of a lovely butcher block topped island from some great friends!
-there is LOTS of storage space in the basement.
-the bathroom is freshly redone.
-we back on to a pretty ravine with a train track running through it. The girls, especially our youngest, LOVE watching the trains go by. Which they do at roughly 10 min. intervals during rush hour.
-wonderful neighbourhood & dream location!

Some not so great things about the place:

-it is FREEZING...windows need replacing, some spots need caulking. Overall I feel like wrapping the whole place in shrink wrap for the winter. I shudder to think of our heating bill. Actually I just shudder.
-the kitchen counters were designed at a time when the height of the average Torontonian was about 5'
-the fridge light is broken & hence is always off.
-the window in the playroom is lexan, not glass, and half of it is an air conditioner. I'm sure that's great in the summer....
-we're right beside a train track, and the whole house rattles each time one goes by.
-it's an older home, hence it does not have enough plugs. And about half of these plugs don't work. And when my LW (*lovely wife) tried to change an ancient fuse, sparks flew. We are calling an electrician.
-the previous tenants had 3 large hairy dogs. The place was not properly cleaned after they left. The dogs scratched up the floors and either the dogs or the tenants punched a hole in the bedroom wall.
-someone painted the lovely exposed brick wall in the living room white. I mean really??!!

Overall, I'm feeling conflicted on the whole home ownership thing. After owning our own place for 7 years, it's kind of nice to look around and think that all the maintenance on this place is NOT my responsibility. But I also love this little place and kinda wish it was ours so we could take it in hand & whip it into shape...if we ever got around to it!

So far, I have been here for 8 days, and I have not, I repeat NOT gone to IKEA. Aren't you impressed?

Canadian Tire Money, pennies and marbles

What do these three items have in common?
They are THE top three most annoying items to deal when you are moving.
Why? They are small, usually found in all kinds of random and aggravating locations (pockets, bottoms of grocery bags, bottoms of drawers) especially in a less than organized house like ours, and you can't. just. throw them out.
at least not without feeling major guilt about
a) wasting money that could some day be spent on motor oil or a gigantic inflatable motion and light activated Christmas snow globe.
b) wasting money that could be spent on penny candy.
c) wasting money by throwing out toys that your kids like and actually play with and really don't take up THAT much space

Rounding out my list of annoying things to run across when packing:

• Broken jewelry....I really used to like that earring/bracelet/necklace until my toddler ripped it up. Maybe someday my wife will fix it for me? Until then I will store it in a ziploc baggie with other broken jewelry until it turns into a hopelessly mangled Gordian knot.
• Half empty containers of stuff....ketchup, hand sanitizer, lotion etc. I don't want to waste it, but how many multiple half empty bottles of the same crap is it really worth moving? Especially hand sanitizer which seems to multiply like rabbits around here as we try to convince our handwashing hating kid to stop spreading germs (nope, doesn't work).
• screws/bolts/nuts and other little metal and plastic thingies that I cannot correctly label (see cordaround post)--these paralyze me. I mean what if I throw out the one thing that holds our shelves together, therefore requiring a trip to IKEA to stand in their miles long customer service line? And if my wife is not around to ask about them I have to save them in my pockets or little ziploc bags until I can find out if they're okay to throw out.
• Batteries. I can't throw them out or else the silent screams of fishies, bunnies and other wild creatures who will be maimed by their corroding acid echo in my head. I know of two places where they can be recycled in this area: 1-my office 2-IKEA . Neither of these places is convenient when I am packing. Enter ziploc bags, that eventually have to be taken somewhere else.

I'd write more, but I'd better pace myself for the rest of the month. If you don't hear from me, I may be underneath a pile of ziploc bags filled with tiny pieces of crap in my basement. Send help.

Cordaround: not a member of the corduroy family.

So I haven't spoken much about my wonderful wife. I could go on about how she's a marvellous mom, terrific teacher, lovely life partner and give many other alliterative compliments.

Anyway, she is definitely the handy one in this relationship. As discovered during a recent google chat.

When we began prepping our current house for moving, we decided to redo the floors in the basement guest room & in our two girls rooms. Replacing gross (and in one case cat pee covered) carpet with clean new laminate would be a good thing for the value of our house, we blithely agreed--plus laminate was on sale! So she worked very hard last weekend, got all the carpet up & new laminate down, leaving only a few bare inches of wall and a gap between the laminate and the wall. Clearly, what was needed was some wood to replace the ratty old stuff she had torn out. I, being the non handy one in the relationship, was very proud that I knew the correct term for said ratty old wood, and proudly brought it out in a recent google chat. "So," I said, "when are you going to replace the cordaround ?" her chat version of apoplectic giggling alerted me to the fact that something was wrong.

Apparently it is not a close relative of the corduroy family, as I had assumed, but is actually called 'quarter round' to reflect the fact that it is a quarter of an inch thick or something. Sheesh! who knew?