Almost Wordless Wednesday

There is a first for everything! First time seeing our backyard in the autumn season. Yep lots of leaves to rake but they will be put to good use as we are adding them to our semi raised garden beds pictured behind the doggy fence. 

Told you previously that we are doing a bit of an Office renovation. Old carpet & glued down underlay have been removed, plywood floor has been given a white wash & three coats of lacquer & walls have been painted a warm gray. Will be painting the trim today. Not sharing any Office pics until the room is done so keeping you in suspense for awhile longer. Stay tuned for pics coming soon!

In the meantime, here's a pic of hubby's clothes closet and yes it is on a chair in the living room and yes it will remain there until his closet in the office is ready for his clothes to return.

Penny Lane on the mend from life altering surgery

Hello Again Hello, Farewell to Office Carpet, Free Stuff & More

 Hello Again my friends; took some time off blogging cause I was busy hanging out with my granddaughter & helping out my daughter and son in-law at their place of business.
But I'm back & that's all that counts right!
Well doing stuff at my daughter's house kind of got me in the mood for renovating again and it's fall & that kind of got me in the renovating mood as well. But after our 2 trips this summer, not a lot of cash in the renovating budget at the moment.
Well so here's our long term plan, Plan A. Eventually we want to install hardwood flooring on almost all of the main floor ( master bedroom, office, hallway, living room ) & we want it to be all the same. Kitchen already has a nice hardwood floor & main bath is getting a different type of flooring. But doing all this flooring simultaneously with quality hardwood involves a bit more cash than we can spend at the moment.
But at the same time, we want to give our main floor rooms a coat of paint, a bit of an update & make the spaces more our own without breaking the bank. So decision has been made to do that & leave the flooring until a later date. The carpeting in most of the rooms has been updated & in decent shape and I can live with it. But the office carpet is another story. I'm sure it's original to our home's beginnings and it kind of looks like someone got sick on it. And that's where this reno begins. We were talking about it just yesterday and came up with a simple temporary fix. Remove the carpet & stain/paint the plywood underlay & update the office with paint, shelving and a new desk. Sounds like a simple, easy peasy fix right? Well I thought the whole carpet would have been removed today & we could stain or paint the plywood in a day or two. Wrong, turns out the carpet has been glued to the plywood underlay and not only do we have to scrape the underlay off, but the glue as well. A bit more work than we bargained for. Honestly who glues carpet to the plywood underlay?
We all know that Rome wasn't built in a day & neither will this space!

All but a small section of carpeting has been removed; but that is the easy part. Been using fabric softener to remove the glue as it worked well when removing wallpaper. Any other solutions/ideas are definitely most welcome!

So Efficiency Nova Scotia came by and installed this warm blanket on our water heater absolutely at no cost to us. They also installed a low flow tap aerator & low flow shower head. Could have also got some energy efficient light bulbs but that's something we already did. If you are living in Nova Scotia and could use some energy efficient product upgrades absolutely free, you might want to check them out. Just click on my underlined link to find out more.

So far I'm in Love with my Space Age Looking Hot Water Heater Blanket; hoping it will create more cash for travel & home renos!

Have I ever told you how much I love free stuff. I'm sure I have. All of the stuff in this pic arrived in my mail box while I was away and shortly thereafter.The Nature Valley stuff was actually a contest prize win cause I enter contests too and I love entering contests as much as I love getting free stuff, and it included 2 drawstring bags, 2 LED flashlights, 4 water bottles, 2 boxes of Nature Valley Granola Bars ( not in pic ) and a $50 Visa gift card, best part! Anyone in need of a water bottle? If you want to know more about how I scored all this free stuff, talk to me!

Perhaps I've Gone Postal & Renovation on the Mind

I've said it before and I'll say it again but I love finding things; rusty things dusty things, all kinds of things & nothing specific. What most folks would most likely consider trash, I consider as treasure. Call me crazy, call me weird, call me whatever. Maybe I've gone Postal! I kind of think I may have been a Pirate in a previous life. For me finding something appealing whatever it may be is  kind of like getting a great deal on something at the store. Kind of gives me a high of sorts. Start The Car!

Beach Finds Unfortunately this tiny Starfish had passed away!

 Rusty Dusty Beach Finds a New Home in my Garden

And yes that is a bone too! Not sure from what but I found it in the woods in my backyard.

We've been starting to kick around some ideas for renovating our office, main bath & master bedroom but not sure which room will be renovated first or last or when any of it will all happen. But part of our office renovations includes moving the armoire from the office into the downstairs guest bedroom and so hubby and I slowly & carefully did that. But to fit the armoire into the guest bedroom we needed to get rid of the existing built in cabinets so we did that too. But when we removed them, we noticed that they had been installed before painting so now there was an 80's/90's hunter green outline on the wall. And while I'm so not ready to re-do this guest room yet, I do want to make it somewhat decent for future guests. Eventually hoping to rip out the Hunter Green carpet and re-paint a different colour but for now planning to re-paint the existing colour on the hunter green border as well as any damaged areas. It's kind of an off white with pinkish undertones to it, but will have to do for now cause I'm just not ready!
Gotta love it when one project  leads to another...

Here'a a pic of our guest bedroom when we purchased the house. Looks like it belongs in the 90's or 80's or even earlier don't ya think?

And here's a pic of the room cupboard free. Oh and I have a Hunter Green window shade which doesn't work properly either. 

Hubby has been plastering & fixing up the damaged dry wall but you can still see the remains of the Hunter Green outline. 

Where has the summer gone & Renovations Continue

Hard to believe it's September already; where has the summer gone? Well actually I know where it's gone to!... from an RV trip to Ontario to visit family & friends, a couple of family & friend visits to our new home here, the installation of new windows on our main floor and a few other small renovations here and there as well as outdoor yard work & regular maintenance. Well that's where it's gone. Thought I'd share a few pics of some of the happenings around here.

So all the Main Floor Windows are brand spanking new! Hubby & Our Two Darling Sons helped install them all except for two smaller ones in the back which I helped Hubby with. Saved a ton of labour costs by DIYing it! Just cost us a few pizzas and beer! Front door & Shutters were painted a warm grey, better known as Welded Iron from The Behr Collection. No more Pepto Bismol blue here except for some remnants of it on the front step. Yeah still need to work on that one; just need to think about it some more!

Penny Lane loves hanging out & ripping around in her new Penny space. So much easier for us to just open the door & allow her run freely outside. 

We didn't want to fence off the whole yard due to the expense of it and we really didn't  need a big fence either cause Penny's one small pup, so we just fenced off a smaller portion of the yard using chicken wire and discounted pieces of pressure treated lumber from the remnant bins at our nearby Lumber Yard. The existing 8 foot or so frost fence on the left side of the yard, saved us from having to fence that side. Just had to block off a few possible Penny escape routes along the bottom! 

Meet some of my new neighbours! Just happened to take a break from my computer and peeked out of my office window to spot this Mama Pheasant & her 9 young ones across the street on my neighbour's lawn.

We had a couple of rain barrels back in Hamilton Ontario and wanted to carry on conserving water here as well. Always trying to do our part for the environment & re-using water saves money too. Got this one delivered right to my door for free. Well not exactly for free. Been doing surveys for a company for several years now and finally decided to redeem some of the points I had earned for this new addition. Kind of late in the season to put plants in the planters that are meant to sit atop of the barrel, but come next spring they will definitely be put to good use.

This was once my light & help needed

So this was once my hallway light. We've been trying to keep existing light fixtures & painting them for a more updated look, but we just couldn't  imagine keeping this one even in our wildest dreams.  (Oh by the way the fact that some of the glass hanging thingys on this fixture were cracked/broken and the fact that this fixture required 11 light bulbs, helped to justify the need to purchase a new fixture.) Although re-purposing what you already have definitely helps to keep costs down, we did find a fairly inexpensive replacement at Ikea. And you check it out; second pic below!

Hallway Light Before

Our new pendant hallway light which we picked up while on vacation at Ikea. NO we didn't vacation at Ikea, we just stopped at one while on vacation. I do love Ikea enough to perhaps vacation at one especially now that we don't live anywhere close to one. So terribly sad. 

Hallway Light After 

And this one only requires one lonely light bulb. 

Only problem is, I still have the remains of the old hallway light fixture and the non broken glass thingys too and I still want to do something with them, just  not necessarily together. Despise the thought of this ending up in the landfill.Could be two completely different projects & not necessarily anything to do with lighting! Any ideas are most definitely welcome & greatly appreciated. Hope I can share a pic of this all being re-purposed in the not too distant future.
Counting on y'all for a bit of help here! Please and thank you!

Remains of old Hallway Light minus the glass thingys which can be seen in the first pic at the top of this post

I've Been Away; did ya notice? & Cottage Bark Recipe

Was greeted with a welcoming evening sky on our way back to our home in Nova Scotia. Twas nice to be away but twas nice to come home too! Unfortunately couldn't capture the sky at it's best; it was simply amazing! 

While I was away I did some eating, well of course I did. But here's a simple recipe of something I simply can't get enough of. It's my sister in law's recipe and she makes this fabulous stuff every time we manage to get to the cottage. Although I love this stuff, I will never make it at home; it's simply too good & way too addictive. It's something I only eat at the cottage. Go ahead & try it for yourself and see if you can limit yourself to just one piece! 

Cottage Bark Recipe 

Sometimes you just gotta stay home & do stuff!

Well you can't always go places & you can't always go shopping cause that costs money. And unfortunately money isn't something that grows on trees, well at least not around here. So sometimes you just gotta stay home & amuse yourself. Been amusing ourselves with this little project.
Took our old medicine cabinet from the downstairs bathroom & re-purposed it. Hubby removed the mirror glass, painted it & the knobs, and added some chicken wire. It was a fairly inexpensive project since we had the chicken wire from a fence project currently being built for Penny L & the paint was left behind by the previous homeowner. I know it's the Pepto-Bismol blue that was used to paint my front door & outdoor trims which I so want to get rid of. But somehow in it' s freshly-painted state & on this particular project, it doesn't look too shabby at all. Doesn't mean we're gonna re-paint our front door & trims this colour though! We've been experimenting with colours on photo shop and so far we're leaning towards a grey colour for those projects.
Last month we had a weekend where you put out usable stuff that you no longer want & where others can pick up perfectly good stuff & prevent it from going in the landfill. We put out a bunch of stuff & thankfully most of it found new homes.Not a fan of seeing good stuff go into the garbage. Hubby wanted to put this medicine cabinet out cause we didn't have a use for it at the time. So glad I convinced him to hang onto it for the time being!
Oh and I painted the memories sign with chalk paint and searched my many boxes of  collectibles to find some decor stuff to add. If you check out the pics below, you will see that the old metal irons have a dual purpose. Sometimes hubby can be such an Einstein and I don't mean that sarcastically!

If you forgot what the medicine cabinet looked like before, here is a before pic when it was still hanging in the downstairs bathroom.

Hubby was looking to find something to flatten homemade burgers on the grill and remembered we had these old- fashioned irons. They work amazingly well!

We transported this plant, a Passion Flower from Ontario in the midst of winter and it survived. Here is it's first bloom in it's new home. However it is a plant that must winter indoors.The bloom almost looks unreal don't ya think?