Open sesame!

Click on the picture and experience the excitement of Olaf cutting the wall open between the kitchen and the dining room (and please excuse the plumber-butt!)

Cooking up a storm

Working part-time certainly has its advantages...Monday morning I emptied out the freezer and went over to my parents' place and did some cooking. Five hours later, I was ready to come home with waffles, mashed potatoes, sausages, macaroni, quiche, date squares and chicken curry. Not necessarily meant to be eaten in that order!

Wired!

Most of the weekend was spent planning out the electricity and then actually running the wiring. Here a weary-looking Tim can be seen comtemplating the possibility of an LCD TV.

When will the spending end?

Our credit cards are certainly sizzling after this week's purchases but hopefully most of the big expenditures have been take care of. Monday saw us ordering all our hardware from Lee Valley and we picked it up at the post office yesterday. Tuesday was Ikea for lighting. Wednesday was Coupal and Bois Franc Rive-Sud for wood. Part of it was so kindly picked up yesterday morning by Eric and then the rest got delivered this morning. Again, Eric was stellar and showed up around 7:30 this morning to help unload it.

Thursday we didn't spend any money as such but the plumber came to estimate the work to be done to move the gas pipe for the stove, move the plumbing, disconnect the kitchen radiator and we figured we'd go all out and might as well replace the remainder of the galvanized pipes in the basement. Youch! Quite a bit more than we expected but they've included coming back to connect the stove & sink and we hadn't planned on changing the galvanized. Westmount also requires that the drain pipes be copper so that added to the total too.

Weekend trip to the States

Tim took Friday off and we packed up the car in the pouring rain to go spend last weekend at my parents' cottage near Malone, NY. It is a somewhat yearly tradition to go down there to celebrate Stéphanie's birthday. We didn't get any skiing in this year though. Conditions were not favourable with the rain we had on Friday. We did go for a few long walks. And some of us tried a little snowshoeing on the way to High Falls (which you can view on Robbie's site - High Falls

We even gave everyone team sweaters for the event...we went down via Plattsburgh to go to Lowe's to buy our kitchen faucet then we went to browse at Old Navy. Tim was looking through a bargain rack and found a sporty top in men's size medium that he thought I might like. I did. I also like the price. $ 1.97! We then spotted another rack with many more of the same sweater, in various sizes. So we had the bright idea of buying one for all our friends who would be there for the weekend. They were a hit! We also found a zip up sweatshirt for the birthday girl at the ridiculous price of $ 0.97! And the salesguys at the cash didn't even bat an eye when we piled 13 sweaters on the counter!

Reno progress

Last week was quiet on the kitchen front. We did a little mudding but that was about it. More time was spent making a sign for my dad and Tim also designed an e-ticket for Cirque du Soleil.

We got final approval for our building permit with the conditions of installing an integrated AC/DC smoke detection system and obtaining a plumbing permit. We think the existing smoke detector installed upstairs with the alarm system should do though. But I still haven't put the permit in the window for all the nosy neighbours to see!