Home Improvements

We’ve been doing some home improvements, lately.

We had been planning on taking our time with these inside the home changes, mainly because I’m not too fussy on these things, and when we initially got here, I sort of thought the only people who would be coming over anyways would be family or friends we already had – basically people who know us too well to be impressed by anything.

However, it turns out that moving to a tiny community and having a two year old are all you need for making new friends, and having already been over to a few different homes up here, we realized that we needed to patch up a few holes before bringing folks over and scaring them off.

When we got the house, the back splash had been taken off, and new materials purchased, but not installed. We’ve been putting off doing the backs plash, mainly because we’re hoping to eventually renovate the kitchen – we don’t want to hire someone to do it, and Jon had never done a back splash before.

I had put it so far off that I had dragged all the boxes of tiles (which were quite heavy) into the basement and into the furnace room among all the imaginary spiders, so you can tell that I really had no plans to do any back splash work.

Jon dragged all the boxes back up, picked up a manual tile cutter and off he went. A lot of lessons were learned, including the value of putting newspaper down on countertops before projects involving adhesive or grout, the importance of starting in the least noticeable spot and working your way out, and the fact that counters and cabinets are actually not level, a fact which becomes much more abundantly obvious when you’re tiling.

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We also started painting the dining room. Initially I had planned on having our meals with guests on our essentially very large coffee table, with floor cushions, sort of an Asian style of eating, in the middle of our living room next to the wood stove. I’m sure no one would really mind eating off of this, but I’m also fairly sure that it’s an unexpected way to be welcomed into a meal, so we’re now getting an actual dining room table and painting the dining room.

I wish I had thought ahead to take some before and after pictures, but to be honest, it was just an empty room used to store a few random boxes and the cat’s travel crate. And it was also just a beige before, so the transformation wasn’t too magical, although the room does look cleaner now, and smells all painty.

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The truth is though, as someone pointed out to me the other day, that it really is the people who come through your doors and that rub your dog’s ears and that give your child a stern warning as he dangles off the balcony dangerously – it’s these folks that make a cottage a home. It’s a disconcerting but heartwarming thing to see someone else discipline your kid.

I think because we’ve been nomadic for so long – in the time we’ve opened the shop, we’ve lived in four different places, not counting the cottage here, and coupled with the fact that opening a business often means precious little free time – we haven’t had a lot of opportunity for “entertaining.”

So in a way, despite the unexpectedness of having to do a few fix-ups, it’s sort of a nice urgency to have to make all these home improvements. A nice sort of unexpectedness.