Decorating on Shoestring

Remember this?

And this old dresser?  I sanded the top of the dresser down to the bare wood by hand, before I got the random orbit sander

Add to it this $20 bookcase off Craigslist

The bookshelf was held together with a lot of glue, and some nails and screws.  With some hammer and chisel work, and some quick heavy blows to the bottom part, we ended up with this.  Damage was minimal, thank goodness.

I'd picked a few cans of paint up from the mistint shelf at Home Depot.  What's not to love about a full can of paint that is both paint and primer, and only $3.  The green paint was a mis-tint also.  It's too hard to decide from a full spectrum of paint chips.  Limit my choices, and I'm much happier.  Kind of how I like to pick library books.  I'm happy if there is a cart or two of books waiting to be reshelved.  Looking over those titles gives me enough choice, and in a few minutes I can usually pick out a half dozen or so books to read.

So the shelf and the dresser were painted with the beige primer/flat paint.  Then one of my other cheap cans was used to paint over it.

Green on the back of the shelf, and the drawer fronts.  Some of the $3 can of dark brown gloss was thinned down by about half with water and brushed over the rest of the beige.  I wasn't really happy how that turned out, so I mixed a bit of red in to change the colour up.  Say it like that and it sounds so simple. Actually, I spent a long time fiddling around adding a bit of this and that to get a colour I liked, and brushed another layer of watered down paint over what I had already done.

The top of the dresser was stained.  I used a water based Minwax stain.  I picked the darkest one.  It didn't turn out anywhere near as dark as it looked in the bottle.  I bought an oil base walnut stain and tried to darken it up.  I thought it had worked, but was reminded that oil and water don't mix.  The oil stain wouldn't dry, well I guess it couldn't soak in, so in the end I had to wipe it off.

Add in some 50 cent pulls from Habitat for Humanity, and we can open the drawers with one hand.  Small things like that make me happy:)

The bookshelf will now be a tv cabinet.  When we get a tv for it, I'll put that shelf, leaning against the bottom right, in the cabinet above the tv.   This is at Wyndson Cottage in Oliver.  We've just come back from a week there.  We did quite a bit of painting.  The walls, none of which are drywall, but are three different patterns of hardboard stuff, were a very blue colour.  They are now Parisian White (cream).  Our furniture is browns, greens and golds.  We are decorating on a tight budget.

Here's looking at the opposite wall from the tv cabinet before we painted.  (The walls were much bluer than they appear here.)

Between hand-me-downs, garage sales, thrift stores, Craigslist and repurposing, not counting the paint, we've spent $75 on our sort of retro-ish, 70-ish living room.  

Those chairs are darn comfy. (Thanks K and N!)

And over looking it all, as she should, is Larry's mum, a hundred and two years younger.  

After all, her legacy helped to make it all possible.

Window Coverings

Quite often when you buy a house, there are other things included in the purchase besides the house and the property.  Frequently the appliances are included, as they were in our case at Wyndson Cottage, and we also got the window coverings.  Not that the window coverings were something I really was drooling over, but you have to have something to give you some privacy, just in case you want to wander round stark naked in the evening.  These windows were covered.  I think every window had at least two forms of covering, several had four, and  one window in the bedroom had five.  We are lucky enough to have two windows in the bedroom, on different walls.  I'm thinking summer, and cross-drafts.  But yeah, five coverings.  First there was a drapery made of a heavy tapestry type fabric.  Underneath that was chocolate brown broadcloth drape.  Then there was vinyl venetian blind.  On the outside of the house there was some special sort of screen, which I've never seen before, that I guess was to prevent the sun shining in.  It was a lot of very thin horizontal bars between vertical strips.  It stopped anyone from being able to see in during the day, but wasn't effective after dark.

And over the top of that was one of those outdoor roll down blinds made of plastic slats.  I would have hated to be trying to get out of that window in case of a fire.

The first morning we rolled up the outside blind.  The inside drapery remained open.  The venetian blinds were used at night, just in case someone in the house next door was able to see in.  As soon as the light was turned out, that blind was pulled back up.  I like to see the sky when I wake up.  Covered windows make me feel claustrophobic. Let the sun shine in!

Getting There

We took our first visit to Wyndson Cottage in Oliver this week.  We were planning on leaving about mid morning, but in our usual fumbling, bumbling unorganized way, it was 2pm before we were finally leaving town.  We did get the bed and a bunch of other small stuff loaded into the truck on Sunday, and figured it wouldn't take long to load the rest into the trailer in the morning. Ha! Should know better.

The weather wasn't cooperative so we had to go and buy a couple of brand new tarps of the appropriate size to cover everything.  The only thing was that what we thought was the appropriate size was actually too big, so I returned them both on Sunday afternoon and got the next size down.  We used the 6 x 4' utility trailer that all the jam and tents and shelves and what have you that we take to the farmers market each week usually travel in.  We had an old rack thing that fit in it that made the sides higher for when we had to use it to haul sheep.  It's a multi-purpose trailer! Anyway, it was just like wrapping a big rectangular present, with lots of places to hook bungees to, so that part was easy.  The truck not so much.  The bed didn't quite fit flat in the back, so was at an angle, and there wasn't always an appropriate place to attach the bungees to.  Larry had it roped and bungeed as best he could. (I had nothing to do with the whole tarping process, I must have been busy doing something more important. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it!)

 We made a stop on the way out to buy some pipe insulation to fit around the rope so that it wouldn't rub the paint on the truck.  Then another stop in Abbotsford to sort some insurance out, and finally we were on our way. Or not.  Less than half an hour out and we had to pull over because the tarp on the truck was rearranging itself, and flying down the freeway at 100+ kph wasn't helping.  We had to pull over in a hurry.  OMG.  All those big rigs now flying by us at 100+kph, just a few feet away, was positively frightening.  We got it fixed, we thought, and I said that if we had to stop again, lets not stop on the side of the freeway.  A few minutes later, as I'm staring into the passenger door mirror, I see a rope flying in the wind, and a piece of pipe insulation disappear behind us.  Once again we had to pull over right NOW!   Fortunately this time we had a couple more feet between us and the traffic.  Seems the rope that had passed through the wheel well with about 6" of clearance from the tire, had burnt through.  Probably as the truck bounced, the tire had caught the rope enough to burn it through.  Well doesn't matter, things were coming undone again.  So ropes and straps were once again rearranged.  We set off again, both of us watching their side through the mirrors.  We made one more stop, our choice this time, and pulled off at an exit to move a couple of bungee cords to stop the last flapping part.  I thought we were never going to get to Oliver.  Thankfully after that, it all went well.

 We were supposed to meet the realtor at his office to pick up the house key, but in the end we met him on the side of the highway, as he was at home by that point, and drove down to where his street met the highway when we let him know we were close.  So we arrived at our cottage about 6:30 in the rain and dark and blustery winds.  We ate some expensive potato chips and come nut cluster thingies that were in a welcome basket while we unloaded the truck.  The plan had been to arrive in time to go and buy some groceries, but we had to make do with a box of cereal and some milk from the drug store for breakfast the next morning,  and can of soup to go with the chips for supper.  The next morning dawned bright and beautiful and sunny, the perfect Fall day.

Standing in the backyard looking northwest.

The Weirdest Dream

As we are getting closer to actually owning Wyndson Cottage, the excitement/anxiety is building.  One more trip to the lawyers to get us to sign something that he missed getting us sign on Tuesday.  Hmm, can we bill him for our extra time and gas money?  The money has been passed over, and Saturday is possession day.  I haven't been sleeping well anyway, but this is just adding to problem.  This morning I was awake at 5, and tossed and turned for a good hour and a half at least, and then finally dozed off.  And then I had the weirdest dream.

We had arrived at our new to us cottage.  I'm calling it a cottage because it is tiny and right now it is a place to visit, frequently I hope, but we won't be there full time.  Of course being a dream, it wasn't the same house.  This one was much bigger.  When we went down to the half basement to see what had been cleared out and what had been left behind, there was this massive long room lined up with old furniture, it looked like an antique store, and there was more furniture there than we would ever need.

The front and back yards were open and unfenced. In reality they are quite private, with hedges, and the back is fenced, and the front has a hedge except for the driveway.  People started appearing on our lawn.  This bothered me, as I don't want other people wandering in to what I consider is mine.  Luna ran off into the yard next door and was sniffing around and wouldn't come back.  We have been wondering how the dogs are going to take to this, are they going to bark to much, will the neighbours be anti-dog.  And all these people kept arriving.  The whole neighbourhood showed up.  They didn't bring us casseroles or weren't particularly welcoming, they were just all there, wandering all over.  I was worried about the deck collapsing (we don't have a deck) and it was this weird wire mesh floor.  Finally people started leaving, and one fellow gave me a list of everyone's names.  And then I woke up with a jolt. There were more details I remembered when I first woke, but in the fashion of dreams, those details quickly faded
.

So the beginning of next week we will load up our little truck and trailer and make the first trip. After our mega dry spell the weather is changing and is not cooperative, but hopefully a couple of big tarps will take care of that.  And here's to no more weird dreams.

The Twist Part

A week after our one night camping trip in Oliver, we were back there again, just for the day.  Four hours driving each way. We shared the driving and it went better than I thought.  We even went for another swim in Tuc-el-Nuit Lake.  We bought more fruit on the way home, and took a side trip in Manning Park.  There is a 15 km road that winds up, way up, to some alpine meadows.  It was evening by this time, and we were loosing the light, and finally decided that it was really too late to go that far.  We settled for going halfway and stopped at the viewpoint.

Here's the view from left to right

Larry was standing too close to the edge for my liking.  It was a long way down.  The wind was gusting.  The only consolation was that it would probably blow him into the sign.

That's the highway and the lodge down there

A week later Larry went back to Oliver on his own, then to Kelowna to visit relatives and stay overnight, and he also brought more fruit back with him.  Nectarines and peaches this time.  Ripe nectarines smell divine. 

All these trips to Oliver were not just about buying fruit. 

They were about buying this.

Meet Wyndson Cottage.

Okay, this really isn't what it looks like, but it could be, with a paint and reroofing job, and that addition out the front.

Yes, we've bought a tiny old 600+ sq. ft. house, on an approximately 60 x 100' lot in the old part of town.

When we first visited Oliver, we really liked what we found there.  We had fun just hopping on our bikes at the campsite and riding over to the store.  We liked the weather.  It gets pretty hot there in the summer, but gets about a fifth of the rain that we get.  These last couple of years I've lost my tolerance for all the rain and the cold, late non-Springs that we have been having.  The physical work required here to keep things looking half decent, combined with physical ailments is becoming a bit much. All that rain means things, particularly weeds and grass, grow at an alarming rate.  Since we don't have many animals now, it's hard to keep up with the beating back of the jungle.  We enjoy our ten acres, but are sort of ready to give something else a try.  So the plan is to use this house to test out how much we really do like Oliver.  To go there and stay for a week or two at a time and see if Oliver is a place that we'd be happy to retire to.  

A friend told me she thought we were smart to do it that way.  She knows of some that have sold up and moved to their retirement town, and then regretted the decision.

It would take us ages to sort out everything here and actually sell the place.  My mum is in a care home 40 minutes away.  We haven't finished sorting everything out to sell her place. 

We aren't ready to cut the mooring lines and sail away for good, but can hopefully enjoy time in both places before making a final decision.  

And if we find that in the end we really don't like Oliver, no harm done, we still have the farm.

It's not all bought and paid for yet, but by the middle of October it will be ours and the bank's.

It's all VERY exciting!