Moving Day!

For Kel that is! With the help of his parents, brother, and friends, we've cleaned up most of the place and ripped off the last bits of protective tape and styrofoam. First up, our kitchen side of the island.  We've finally taken off the protective blue film and styrofoam.  We've even boiled a pot of water (as per chinese traditions on move-in day).  Can't wait to start baking in our convection oven and try out the induction range!

The other side of our island aka the dining room.  Please excuse the bare window frames (I promise we'll get to them soon!).   You can see our temporary all purpose table and plastic stools. They've helped us out a lot throughout our renovations!  Kel's put together our two bar stools and finally, our new shiny hardwood floors are ready for pictures!

Our living room with temporary curtains and random knick knacks.  And no, its not hot or stuffy in the house, the fan is another chinese tradition for move-in days.  Our steps and rails aren't quite finished yet, so you can see our shoes on a piece of cardboard at the top of the stairs.  That's the new border of our no shoes zone!







Below left is our office. Kel's moved in and assembled his desk.  We've moved his dresser drawer in here for now, but as you can see, the drawers are still lying on the ground.. :P
Below centre is our master bedroom.  Apparently, today's a good day to move in the lunar calendar, but not a good day to assemble the bed?!  Go figure.  Kel's going to sleep with the mattress on the ground tonight, and assemble the bed frames tomorrow.  We still need to go look for curtains, too.
And below right is our walk-in closet.  We haven't set up the shelves, racks, and all the goodies yet.  But then it's not like Kel's unpacked yet either.

As you can see, we still have a lot of shopping to do for the house and I've started last week with the Droppar jar sale at IKEA. :)

And I'll end this post off with our Quatchi chilling at the house.

Hardwood Brands and Quality

Since we bought our hardwood floors on sale, they were dedicated lot sizes. This means that we actually got three different colors and three different brands.  Our master ensuite (bedroom and walk-in closet) is by Mirage, the office is by Superior Flooring, and our living/dining/hallway is by Satin Finish.  After working with these brands, we can honestly say that although all three are Canadian owned and operated, there is quite a bit of difference in quality and care.  Simply the way the wooden planks were packaged inside the boxes speaks volumes. Every other row in the Mirage box was flipped.  This means that the underside of the planks would only come into contact with other undersides, and the smooth finished side with other finished planks. Superior Flooring took even more care with their product, in that they had a thin piece of foam between each row.  Satin Finish was by far the worse of the three. Their wood was laid in one direction so the rough underside of the top rows would be pressing against the smooth finished side of the bottom rows.  One would figure that they'd be more careful being "satin finish" and all, their surface is shiny and more prone to scratches.

As we worked through the house, we found that Satin Finish not only had the most scratches, but also the most defects.  The scratches didn't just come from the poor packaging, but also the poor quality finish.  There were planks with random dents, and sometimes even knots in the wood that wasn't fully finished.  As well, we also found quite a number of cracked pieces, that's broken down the vertical!  By now you may think maybe it's because we used a different species of wood with Satin Finish and so there's an added factor of them having a different hardness.  However, Maple was used for all three brands and so for anybody looking into getting new hardwood flooring, we will definitely recommend Mirage and Superior Flooring over Satin Finish anyday!

Hardwood explosion

Over the last couple of days, we've been quite busy at the house!  Kel's finished laying down hardwood for not just the master ensuite, but also the office, living, dining, and hallway!  All that's left now are the linen and coat closets.  Erica and her dad's been here for the last few days, too.  They've been helping out with the detailing.  Her dad's been framing doors around the house as well as hanging doors.  And of course, Erica's been plastering and sanding all the nicks Kel's been making in the process. :)  Kel's also ripped out the nasty green carpet that was in the foyer and his dad's tiled it.  Kel is actually grouting the foyer tiles as I type.  (No, we don't actually have Internet at the house yet, but our neighbour, "Joe" does and his connection is not protected. :)

Below, you can see the temporary rails Kel's put in for our staircase.  He had to rip out the old ones to lay the hardwood and the new ones can't be installed until the new hardwood's down.

I wasn't going to post any pictures of our floors yet because their current condition simply doesn't do it justice!  We've laid out all the hardwood planks on the floor to size to speed up the installation process.  It's like the hardwood's exploded all over our living-dining room!

And here's Kelly, grouting our foyer tiles at 11:52pm!

One step closer!

Erica finished painting the ensuite washroom and the walk-in closet last night :)  There's still some touch up to be done in the master bedroom, but we'll get to that later.

Below: The view from inside the ensuite washroom. You can see the shower, the darker grey wall of the washroom, the lighter grey in the closet, and the light green master bedroom with hardwood floors installed.  Next up, finishing the hardwood floors in the walk-in closet!

Hardwood floors have begun!

We've started installing hardwood floors this week! Right when you thought there's nothing else to rip out of the house, too! We've ripped up the old hardwood from the master bedroom, closet, and hallway. My job was to rip out all the nails that were still stuck on the wooden planks before people stepped all over them. I sure hope they had a nail gun back in the day, because there were a whole lot in there!

Below you can see the wax paper we've laid out and the newly installed planks.  And of course, Kel taking a break enjoying his work.

Meanwhile, Erica's busy running around trying to finish painting as much as she can before the hardwood goes in.

Materials for the house

Kel finally made it to the flooring store today before their warehouse closed and picked up our lot of hardwood for the living/dining and hallway!  We were originally planning on getting someone in to sand and repolish our existing hardwood floors, but with the current sale, it isn't costing us very much more to get new ones.  Next step would be to pick out the hardwood for the office off of their sale list, and order the ones for our master ensuite!

One of our tasks for tonight is to finish tiling the shower wall in our ensuite.  Kel's already pre-cut all the necessary pieces over the weekend.  Keep your fingers crossed, I might just be able to post pictures of the finished wall tiles later tonight. :)