poplar road

Well, it's official. We set the possession date at October 6th, and we move most of our belongings - 32 boxes and counting plus most of the furniture - on Sunday the 10th, the Thanksgiving weekend. Our biggest thanks will go to the Olsen twins, who have offered themselves and their truck to help us get from here to Pritchard in one trip if possible.

The plan is to use what we have: the Dodge with canopy, the trailer with sides added (after Mechano has been dropped off at the property on Saturday), and Ben's Dodge, possibly even his trailer if we need it. The essentials I'll need to finish out the month at the apartment will stay until the 30th, but already I have almost everything packed up. The kitchen is beginning to remind me of the camper, and it's getting hard to move around without bruising my hips and smacking my elbows. Of course that might have something to do with me wandering around half dazed from over-excited sleepless nights and too much day-dreaming.

(Is there such a thing as too much day-dreaming?)

The amount of business to take care of just to move, never mind buy the house, is staggering. In addition to the basics - hydro, phone, notice to the landlords - there's forwarding mail, booking the elevator key and padding, notifying all our other services or memberships of the new address, and unfortunately in our case, trying to decide on an internet service provider when the choices are only Telus dial-up versus satellite. Having just put myself on the path to working 3 days a week over the net for the office, a day a week minimum on my sister's website (www.appleturnover.ca), and my spare time apart from renos and fiction on this web log, it's scary to think my life may be in the hands of a 56K modem. Yikes!

Here are Richard’s first photos of the inside of the house, starting with the view from the front door, looking toward the northeast corner. Again, the furniture, drapes, and other stuff are the previous owners', not ours!

The dining and family room create a great room which will be wonderful for entertaining and feeding a crowd. It's about 28 feet long, and open to the kitchen at the back (to the right of the French doors).

Why the previous owners chose that blue industrial carpeting is a mystery, as the kitchen has been floored in laminate (see below), and the hallway in another shade of laminate. Laminate isn’t ideal for kitchen flooring, however, so we’ve considered replacing the whole area with slate or hardwood. In the meantime, since I grew up in a renovation, I have no problem walking around on plywood – better than that blue stuff!

The front of the north wing has a sunken living room over-looking the street. A large gas fireplace – unfortunately painted white over the brick - divides it from the great room behind.

I initially thought we’d use this as a seating area as it’s laid out in this photo, but Richard has some brilliant ideas to transform this into my office. Bright, cosy, with a view of (potential) flower gardens, enough wall space for bookshelves and the option to close it off from the great room with a door on one side of the fireplace and a built-in bookshelf on the other. Richard loves the look of riverrock, so eventually we will recover that awful painted brick. My plants will love this room with all that light.

The kitchen, at 11' x 14', is a dream come true for Richard. Imagine it with base cabinets inset with custom commercial rangetops on one side and an overhanging counter above barstools on the other, extending from the right-hand wall to divide the kitchen from the dining room. And a stainless steel dishwasher (coming soon as the one in the photo is broken), side-by-side fridge, and gas oven. Of course for now we'll have to settle for the new dishwasher and a coat of paint.

We've got lots of ideas to make this the ultimate venue for Richard's talents as a chef, little by little. The renovations to the kitchen will probably make up a large portion of the pictures on this site over the coming months (years?). I'm looking forward to our housewarming party.…which may be next spring if we're lucky. At least with a kitchen this size, we can unpack and start cooking right away, and make improvements here and there as we have time and funds. Just getting that strip of wallpaper off the walls and painting over the yellow cupboards (which are studily built of plywood and won't need replacing) will make a world of difference!

The hallway bisects the main floor, with closets and two bedrooms at the front, and the kitchen, basement stairs, main bathroom, and master bedroom at the back. The master bedroom has an ensuite "bathroom" with no bath hidden along the rear wall of the house, a tiny closet with a cramped sink and toilet, with carpeting! Guess what we'll be ripping out first?! That's real cedar on the south-east wall (which backs on the second garage). We'll do our best to salvage all of it when we remove it, and use it elsewhere if we can. (There is a room downstairs with its ceiling beautifully covered in cedar, with a bit on the walls, but the rest of the room boasts three contrasting varieties of '70's imitation wood panelling. Yech!)

The main floor has two spare bedrooms, both about 9' x 10', with windows over-looking the courtyard. One of these rooms will be furnished as soon as possible so we can have guests to stay, and the other will be our bedroom temporarily while the carpeting and cedar are removed from the master bedroom. We might eventually bump out the wall between the master and corner bedrooms to add a real ensuite bathroom and more livable closet space.

The flooring in the two spare rooms is laminate, the third type of laminate in the house, and the most attractive, so the guest room will thankfully only need insulation and furniture to make it ready for visitors. Richard plans to insulate all exterior walls as part of making our home as energy efficient as possible. The bonus for me (besides not turning blue this winter) is it will create deeper windowsills for my houseplants! The guest room is probably the only one we’ll be able to get “finished” before Christmas.

We've been starved for space for friends - no guest room in the apartment, and no spare seats in the truck! - so we're looking forward to being able to host a crowd. With 1500 square feet per floor, it's going to feel like a castle for the first few months. The current basement layout is a bit strange, with two long, narrow rooms and a mystery closet set in the middle of the largest room; but we think some walls can be shifted, and we'll get another bedroom or two down there once the electrical work and cleaning are done.

This room with the brick fireplace is directly beneath the great room upstairs. There are two high windows at the opposite end to let in daylight, and we’ll redo walls and floors to brighten it up. Once the stench (and I mean STENCH) from the previous owners’ dogs is eradicated, it could turn into a very comfortable space. Richard the ex-HVAC salesman took one look at the wood-burning fireplace and said we'll be replacing it with gas, but I don't think we'll change it otherwise. The previous owners did all the work on it, scrubbing it with acid and a toothbrush to get the white paint off. Pity they didn't have the patience to repeat the job on the upstairs!

And finally, for those of you who share Richard's obsession with shop space, here are shots of the two garages. The first used to be a two-door, but the door on the left was filled in and when we saw it the space was so full of junk it's hard to tell if it will really fit two vehicles. The gravel drive between the garage door and the retaining wall with root cellar is a bit narrow for our large truck to turn around in so backing in or out could be tricky - although hardly as bad as the apartment parkade.

The window in the first shot is the one you can see on the front of the south wing in the main photo of the house. Richard really wanted that mower - his photos really don't do justice to the enormity of that back yard - but the previous owner wouldn't part with it. Might have to test the mower attachment on the Unimog!

The second garage used to be a carport, which they filled in (with blue vinyl siding on the outside - see the back yard photos), and the door is high enough to allow our camper inside. Or Stubby Mechano, if Richard has time or energy to do a little tinkering on the 4x4 over Christmas. (Hah.) Between the two garages he should have enough room to store his tools, truck parts, and things like bikes and camping gear, and still have space to work on reno projects; truck stuff will have to wait until he can tackle the barn.

So that's Poplar Road, "before". I'm looking forward to seeing it again when we move in, just in time for my birthday and Thanksgiving. Won't we have a lot to be thankful for this fall!

Here are more images of the house and property as I first saw it on September 1st, starting with the outside. Note that these were taken with the previous owner’s stuff still lying around.

The house faces roughly west, with a north and south wing framing a courtyard in front. The south wing is all garage – two of them. The courtyard in between has a grape vine growing over the low wall, and a walkway between the entrance and the garage door. The house sits back from the street behind a circular driveway, and what was once the vegetable plot is just past the fence on the north side. On the south end the retaining wall at the edge of the property contains a root cellar.

We’d like to paint the stucco green – a dark olive shade we found called “Crocodile”, and add natural rock elements in place of the so-called Spanish style facades. The goal is a West Coast/Whistler Chalet feel, organic, spacious but warm, and comfortable.

We were hoping for an acre with potential for a shop, fruit trees, and space for flowers as well as truck parts. Poplar Road has all of these, although the green spaces have run a little wild from neglect. In addition to the overgrown vegetable patch there are two apple trees, one beside either wing, three crabapples by the garden shed, a small cherry, and a chestnut. With the first frost coming soon after we move in, I doubt we'll tackle anything in the yard or barn until spring. Richard will use the garages as his shop for now, and eventually convert the barn by removing the floor of the hayloft.

We are on a well and septic system, both of which are in good shape – excellent water. The small shed in this picture houses the well, and will hopefully be my potting shed this spring. You can see the length of the property – there’s more to it than these photos can capture! The barn alone is gigantic, and will need its own gravel drive to get out there. Richard is quite anxious to get started, and I would love to do a little gardening, but there's so much to do inside first!

That’s all of the outside for now. (I’m looking forward to seeing it covered in snow, which may happen by the time I move up there in November, the way this weather is going.) The remaining photos from September 1st are from the inside.