Touch You Last

I'd like to say we spent every free minute of the past month working on the house, and that I was waiting for things to be perfect before the grand online unveiling, but... no. After the un oldtimey-ing was complete (thanks largely to Sarah's parents--the best hard labour a marriage can buy,) we unpacked a little more, tidied some, but then took a break. At the time, I felt that we'd gotten pretty lazy, but in retrospect we were also on the go a lot of the time. But this weekend, we've got nothing on the docket so we should get some good work done. But without further ado, here's the house. The ground floor, anyway (just because that's where the most dramatic changes have taken place). Main Hall This one feels a bit like one of those weight-loss before/after sets. The before pic is poorly lit, the angle is all cockeyed, and the camera is pushed in close to make it just that much more claustrophobic. The main hall was the last room we painted. Living Room I...

The marathon house reno session has begun. Sarah and I have argued about whether or not this is a large-scale reno, and I guess she's right--we're not tearing down drywall or putting in new plumbing, so I guess it's not a massive undertaking. But what's made it harder than your usual paint and de-wallpapering is the fact that very little of the wallpaper (and there is a shitload of it) is dry-strippable. The front hall was gloriously dry-strippable, then came the second bedroom (which Sarah's dad called "the low-hanging fruit room" for its relative ease to finish,) then came the back hall and powder room which was close quarters and pretty damn hard, but the worst is the master bedroom. The paper in there was like vinyl, in no way porous and even pretty resistant to scoring. And when you're lucky enough to tear an inch of paper away from the wall, underneath is backing paper which must have been applied with Elmer's Glue. On top of all this,...

Okay, so the house: We’ ve been looking at houses since shortly after Christmas. We wanted, well, pretty much the same things anyone working in a city wants—to be outside the city but not out in the sticks, to feel like a community and not just be part of a faceless burb , to be near public transit, and to get a good house that wouldn ’t take sixty years to pay off. With all this in mind, we decided to look exclusively in Blackburn Hamlet—a small community that is part of Gloucester, just before Orleans. It’s about half an hour away from downtown by bus, it’s a bit like Georgetown— and it’s surrounded by a greenbelt and grandfathered in so it can’t go all obese and nasty with overdevelopment . Our agent came well recommended and she was just amazing throughout. She had a great eye for detail, and she was available any time we needed her. It was a slow process, but mostly because only sixty or so houses come on the market in Blackburn a year. It’s filled with a lot of people who...