I think it has potential

Well I was brave enough to take some photos of the basement in it's early days so we can have something to laugh about when we're done (done...I like that word).

Looking downstairs into my 'office'This will be a future storage room, just off from the officeThe laundry room (how depressing does that look?)The bathroom!Looking from the new spare bedroom/whatever room towards the bathroom

Whoops...Merry Christmas!

It was back to moving around the boxes o'crap last night, and I opened the closet door in the spare bedroom and guess what I found??? One of Trevor's Christmas presents from last year -- I forgot to wrap it and give it to him. Oops! It was a hand crank flashlight. I think it was a bigger hit this way for some reason, as this little flashlight will have a story to go along with it for a longgggg time.

Be afraid, be very afraid

Last night was the first weeknight push to get the crap out of the basement. Not sure if it really went well or not. I feel like all I've managed to accomplish is adding junk to more and more rooms in the house. I've started to clear out the spare bedroom to put things in it that we want to keep; the loft room will be for all of the boxes from the office that need to be moved in; and the downstairs living room will be the designated garage sale room (but is it big enough???). Scary. My house has been turned into a Public Storage warehouse.

At the office I managed to pack 5 boxes yesterday and set them close to the door so I just grab one as I leave at the end of the day and bring back to the house. Hopefully that will make a smaller job of it (spreading the pain out over multiple weeks).

Trevor needs credit

So apparently in my postings I tend to not glorify Trevor's construction skills (might give him a big head).
Let me redeem him here:

1. He has so many tools that if anything breaks/cracks/falls over it will be repaired. (But when? I ask.)
2. When he does build/fix things, they are done skillfully*.
3. He's great at planning things out.**


* And to extremes. Those skillfully crafted/repaired items can usually take the weight of a car.
** And planning. And planning. The man draws and writes on any blank sheet of paper he can find.

Can I get off now?

My weekend went a little something like that drawing (although most times you would find me on the picnic table below the ride looking pale and shaky). Up, up. up. Down, down, down. By Saturday morning I felt like I finally had come to terms with the whole home office deal now, I think it took Trevor a bit longer (he started his 12 steps of accepting a little later than me, although maybe his 'denial' stage just lasted longer, lol!). I'm now focussing on the positives of the situation rather than the negatives (but those negatives have a way of sneaking up on you). Maybe this is a big life test for me or something (that's the newest rationale I came up with last night in the shower). Maybe this is all meant to happen. Maybe if I keep on saying these things I'll eventually believe them.

I hit a big DOWN moment last night when we sat down after dinner and ran through a tentative schedule. It's looking like we're not going to hit the target of August 22, and instead, it looks like I'll be working downstairs (in the deep, dark, dank....wait! positives!...lovely, bright, cheery, new basement) around September 8th at the very earliest, and that's not even with everything completed. That's just having a floor and some walls. *sigh* That was pretty depressing.

Combined with all of the new stresses of figuring out where to put everything, permits, inspections, transferring addresses, phone lines, contacting clients...and MONEY. Money, money, money.

We sat down and had a good tete-to-tete last night and laid it all down between us. I wanted to make sure that before we start to get into all of this that both of us realize that at some point we will be ticked off at each other, stressed out and probably ready to rip the other person's head off. But we also agreed that we'd look at this HUGE project as small projects lumped together so we don't get to that point of laying it all down and having a smackdown with the two of us (I'd root for me!). Hopefully that will help with all of the overwhelming work and planning (and trips to Home Depot).

One thing is for sure, I've never felt so grateful for help. Cynthia told me that Mike volunteered to help with the electrical which made me (and still makes me) want to jump over the moon. I am so happy about that, SO HAPPY! Mike, you are the man! (And thank you for not letting Trevor do it, I don't want another light show in our house.) Now all we need are friends that are plumbers, drywallers, etc, etc! LOL! (We'll be investing in the Plumbing 1-2-3 book from Home Depot, for sure.)

So with all that going on, we finally started this weekend. It's a bit of a battle seeing as we have 80 other projects on the go, but I had time on Saturday (and some sunny weather) to go outside and finish laying bricks on the patio and clean up a bit. Trevor worked a bit more on the bedroom and did some moulding in the upstairs bathroom. Then on Sunday I began to tackle the basement. The scary, scary basement. We've planned for a garage sale on July 7th, and we plan on being ready to start the basement well before that (auuuuuughhhh!!!!). There is so much crap down there, after 3 hours I just walked in circles not knowing what to touch yet. 3 garbage bags later and some cardboard...well, it still doesn't look that much better. I figure I might have to start working 4 days (or less a week) to be able to keep this schedule alive and keep things on track. Makes me tired just thinking about it (but also makes me want to scream like Xena warrior princess and rip through the crap in the basement).

How plans change...

It's been a long week. And the news I got yesterday:

Yes, after months (actually, a year) of thinking that I would have an office in Chilliwack, it's all gone tits up. The rent on it is about 3 times as much as we pay now (for our lovely office that is noisy, dirty, has broken tiles, broken window, toilet that runs, cooks us in the summer and freezes us in the winter...the list goes on). So that just doesn't fit into the financial picture. Ask me how I feel about all of this and I'll sum it up like this:
So the only solution we're left with is having me work from home. Which poses a few problems, wait...let's call them 'interior issues'. These 'interior issues' result in having to FINISH OUR BASEMENT to fit the office into the house. Which means that, officially, even more of our house will be unlivable, and I have to plan the mother of all garage sales. Purge purge purge!

I think I'm slowly coming around to the idea of this.

But I'm not there yet.

1,375 days of...

being married. LOL!!! I went to a website on Cynthia's blog (www.thenest.com) and signed up so I could have access to some of their lists and templates, and BAM, there was the number. Made me laugh. Also made me yell over to Trevor to tell him we've had 1,375 days of bliss. LOL!