renovations – Page 2 – Whatsittwoya

Hair Straight Back

The time had come to start searching for carpet, and with a few leads, Cass and I headed out to go looking at a few options. Colours, textures, stainguard or not, etc… An annoyance when it comes to things like these, is the simple onslaught of options available to choose from, and then the salesmen sizing you up to see where their profit is.

If there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that when your buying retail, you’re getting bent over hard, and to know it before you walk into the store, and to know they know it as well when they try to “sell” you is even more annoying, but when you don’t deal with these things on a daily basis, how are you to come by better pricing? Thus the game.

At the bottom of the list of options was an ad placed on Kijiji for a chunk of carpet that seemed worth a look. Having tiled the kitchen area, I no longer had to find volume in one colour, and I thought this ad would do for the bedroom carpet.

That ad turned out to be an installers son selling off his Dads’ cutoff inventory, and had a whole garage full of chunks at wholesale prices. I walked away from there with carpet, underlay, and the name of a good installer. Read more “Hair Straight Back” →

At Home

TV Set

The last post seems so long ago, you’d think that nothing has been done in the meantime, but it has. Finger twiddling, head scratching, procrastination, and avoidance… These are essential abilities in constant need of maintenance and development. There was also a trip to Regina in there, which goes a long way in explaining the pause, a garden to put in, and a swarm of aphids to contend with.

From whence I left off… I was muddling about with what I was going to do in the kitchen area as I readied it for carpet. Smooth edge (carpet tack strip) is both glued and nailed onto concrete, so the edge tiles had to go. They came up so easily, I ended up getting rid of them all. It’s always better to get rid of the old, and the smell that came up once they were removed was musty and old. Good riddance.

I was caught between carpeting the whole thing again, or small sections of tile. Should I go just under the fridge and stove, or 5 feet out from the cabinets, or what? In the end, the light went on, and I decided to tile the whole shebang, and add area rugs where I wanted them. It might be cold under foot in the winter, but this solved the majority of the problems. Read more “TV Set” →

At Home

The Renos – Part II

With most of the evicted items out of the garage and spare room now, the rotation of room contents continued. Everything out, including the closet doors and shelf. Then up came the baseboards and the ugly carpet that covered a layer of original tiles.
Read more “The Renos – Part II” →

At Home

The Renos – Part I

This is a long awaited post that will outline the home renovations completed a few years ago. Posting about it never occurred to me at the time, as I didn’t think anyone other than us might be interested, but it’s a story that can be told, so why not? I mean, I took enough pictures, and there are lots of posts of other renos… So, without further adoo…

During the summer of 2014 I renovated the entire main floor of our house, beginning with the living-room and hallway and progressing one room at a time until complete. The house was built in 1968, and is typical of that era with mahogany doors and trim, sparkly stucco ceiling, and carpet and tiles for flooring.

Read more “The Renos – Part I” →