Renovation news coming soon but for now wedding photos

Some of our wedding photos are up at Byron's blog. He did an amazing job making the fellas look good....a heck of lot of work considering the 10 second attention span we have...the girls well that was easy....judge for yourself...

Byron's Blog

Next stop the bathroom

Mel and I are now way into our bathroom reno. We have over the past week and a bit completely gutted it. The idea is to expand our incredibly small bathroom into the adjacent bedrooms. Our new bathroom will be much bigger and will have a Zen like spa feel.


First thing is first....anyone need a clawfoot castiron bathtub? We are getting ride of ours as we are just going to put in a shower. The bathtub will need to be re-enameled, which can be done on site.






Here is the view from the door of the bathroom. As you can see we are down to the studs in the wall....hopefully we are insulating before the cold weather really hits.





The plan is to put in the bathroom sink and vanity first then the shower after. This way we will have half a working bathroom at all times. You can see the temporary plumbing I have done so far. I have to recommend IPEX tubing as an easy to install replacement for copper piping...you even get away from soldering as the connectors use compression valves.




Here is the view from the shower. The toilet will either rotate to be parallel to the exterior wall or may go against the wall between the office (the new studs in this photo). This will depend on how easily I can do work on the plumbing stack and if I can work around the floor joists....it's not a good idea to cut into joists to move plumbing, never mess with the structural support of a house.







Here is the view from the office looking towards the shower. The sink is now gone and we are brushing our teeth in the kitchen. Where the sink is might be the new location for our toilet....beats peeing infront of the window I guess. Unfortunately it means I may have to rip open my nicely finished living room pillar to gain access. This would be the first time in this reno that we have had to tear something apart after it was complete...which in most renos is the usual instead of the norm.




We are not likely to get much done this weekend as we are headed to Niagara on the Lake to hang with my cousins, do some wine tasting and maybe check out Frank Lloyd Wright's Darwin Martin House in Buffalo.

Honeymoon photos

I have finally taken the time to upload our honeymoon photos...rather than put them in the blog I have put them up on my Flickr site.

Here they are.....click here

I hope you enjoy them.

Hintonburg gets new slumlords :-)

Well it has once again been a while since we have posted nay new info regarding our renovation. Can you really blame us...first off we got married then we took a 3 week honeymoon and then upon our return the weather has been perfect. In fact I have not seen an October like this in my entire life. Who says global warming is bad....just kidding.

We also have some good news especially for those who have not heard yet. Mel and I just purchased our first income property. It's a triplex located down the road on Stirling from us. We are very excited and are extremely happy as we got a great deal on a place that needs minimal work for the time being....I guess we are going to be the latest 'slumlords' in Hintonburg...actually I am just kidding. We plan on starting work on the exterior next summer turning the place into one of the cooler buildings in the neighbourhood. We will also modernize the apartments as they become empty.

I should also give 'props' where 'props' are due. We would like to thank Andy Morrissey our Agent for helping us navigate an income property purchase....if anyone is looking for a great, energetic agent who lives in and knows in detail the Hintoburg community this is your guy....any kickbacks are appreciated Andy :-).

The good news is that we have started the next phases of the reno. We are currently removing all the old lath and plaster in the bathroom and will be taking out our old cast iron tub to replace it with a nice new and modern shower all very Zen like.

I also took some time last weekend to build a bookcase which will be a built in the living room as well as two new concrete countertop forms....I can't wait to see how they look. The top of the bookcase will be covered by a concrete countertop with built in planters.

We're back

Well it's now time to get back to reality. Mel and I arrived back in Ottawa yesterday afternoon.

We spent the last 4 days of our trip in Paris where we spent most of our time checking out museums and some sights.

We got to visit the Louvre and even got to see the Mona Lisa....I guess the readers of the DaVinci Code sleep late. It is amazing at all the art and artifacts the louvre has. They come from all over the world and were likely accumulated a long time ago....likely during Napolean's conquests. The Louvre has a great Egyptian section.

We also got to see the Pompidou where they have a large modern art collection including paints or scultptures from Pollack, Dali, Picasso, Munch and many more.

On our last day we visited the Rodin museum and got to see most of all of his great works...including The Thinker, The kiss, Hells Gates, and much much more.

We also visited the Pere Lachasse cemetary where we visited the graves of Jim Morrison, Oscar Wilde and Delacroix.

We also visited the Eiffel Tour, The Arc of Triumph and the Champs D'Elysee. Most of which was by foot...I think we lost some weight on the trip despite all the food.

Mel and I took a night bus tour of Paris were we got some great photos of the more famous Paris landmarks...look for photos shortly

Paris was alive with people from all over the world coming for the rugby tournament. Heck on Wednesday Britain played South Africa in Paris and the place swelled up with British.

I will be posting...hopefully soon....some photos....the good ones of the over 1800 I took.

I will also post a link to my flickr account where all the photos will be posted.

Now it's back to reality, work and renovations.