Little Cape Cod on the Ridge

Welcome back! It has been months and months since my last post and a lot has been happening with the house. When I last posted, we had just finished framing the addition and the roof was being built. Now, we're almost ready to move in (and I say that with a very optimistic attitude) if everything goes well. I am, once again, changing my approach to blogging this renovation, as I have fallen way way behind. Here's my excuses: my computer crashed, Caleb broke my camera, and I lost my internet all within the same week. The truth is, I got caught up with the stress of building a house, becoming a single mom, and keeping up with the day to day struggles of life and just put this blog on the back burner. Don't fret! We (Caleb, Charlotte, and I) are back with strong support from family and friends, and we are stronger than ever!

Before I get into the month by month progress reports, it's time to come clean. This renovation has been a financial mess! It started out well but the snowball/might as well/I quit effect had a huge impact on the progress of the build and, as a result, the bills have added up. I have yet to talk about the money behind the renovation and I planned to finish the house and then post about the mistakes people (I) made, but this project has gone on so long and so many mistakes have been made that I'm to the point of desperation. It will be a year since we started tearing the Little Cape Cod on the Ridge apart and I am running out of time. The short story is we didn't get people paid quick enough and they want their money and are going to get it one way or the other. There are many things to blame, my big dreams, poor planning, contractors quitting, not having enough liquid cash upfront, not knowing I needed that cash...misinformation, business sharks, bad decisions, I could go on and on, but the bottom line is if I don't finish this house in a month I'm going to lose it, be in a whole lot of debt, and have nothing to show for all the blood, sweat, and tears (literally) that I put into the place.

What am I doing about it besides working my butt of building the place? Well, when everything in my life falls apart, I call my biggest supporters - my family and a few very close friends. First and foremost, my kids have spent a year of their lives being absolutely perfect. They have spent more time than I care to share waiting around to actually have some fun, physically helping with absolutely anything (Caleb) I'd let him, and continuing to show excitement about "the new house" which makes it all worth it. My dad has stood by me through it all, even when we've wanted to kill each other. My mom has been there since January, watching my kids so I can get as much work done on the house as possible. My brother, Phil and mortgage broker extraordinaire, is doing everything he can to work out my finances and get this done. My sister, Sonya, keeps me calm when I vent about the whole situation. My sister Laura is taking action (like she does best) and working tirelessly on a new project to save everything. And my close friends have listened to me cry and stress out about all the craziness that is my life for months without once telling me to pull it together. P.S. I love you all so much!

Enough of that! Lets get to the fun part.

December (Don't read this if danger makes you queasy)

- After getting a quote of $21,000 to have the roof done, Dad and I drove to Woodstock and bought the metal and accessories for the roof ourselves, started watching YouTube videos, and got to work. Might I add, that it is December, the temperatures are -40 degrees here in New Brunswick, Keswick Ridge is extremely windy, and the only place to warm up is in my gas-guzzling Expedition! So, as dangerous as it was, and unless you've experienced putting on a steep metal roof in the middle of winter with homemade staging and two kids crying to go home in the background, you have absolutely no idea. When I said "blood, sweat, and tears" before, this is where a lot of the blood and tears came in. Oh, and don't be fooled that I'm not in the pictures. I was right up there by his side every single time!

Homemade staging...not cool! Imagine climbing out that window onto a frost-covered board with no harness and yelling at each other over the wind...with a twenty foot piece of sharp metal flapping around. Now pinch yourself, you've survived another day!

My hero

Love this boy to the moon and back!

Warming up

So, after weeks of almost killing ourselves and having very little progress to show for it, I decide to pull the plug on the dangerous job and hire professionals. They told me the job would take three days. Weeks later (due to horrible weather), the roof was not completed. They did, however, put in windows and doors (in the wrong places), build some walls (in the wrong places), and insulate and strap the outside of the addition.

And here's one of the views that stole my heart and made me buy this place. I still dream of my kids running through these fields and growing up here.

Notice the lack of snow building up? That's because it's so friggin' windy up here!

January

- This month was spent rushing to get the roof done and the building water-tight so we could get the insulation put in. I moved a lot of furniture to the basement to get stuff out of the porch (starting to want it ripped off). When I say "moved," I mean I carried it all by myself and slid down two 2x6's hopefully not to my death! We dealt with a tricky situation in the addition because the trusses were built wrong and the walls would have been too short. The electrical started to go in and Caleb kept himself busy like a trooper.

Returned from a little Christmas vacation to a visitor. We told Caleb it was dinosaur bones and he showed everyone who walked through the door.

Kitchen window removed to make way for a new one. I want the traditional, symmetrical look of a cape cod.

Door to future mudroom

Basement "stairs"

Moved all this:

Tricky corner of the roof we got lots of advice on from my uncle

Once again, someone else messed up and I was too nice to make them eat their mistake, so we had to figure it out.

Can you build a house with a chainsaw? Bookers can!

Our favourite electrician

Better safe than sorry. Lots of threats were made to make him keep this on.

My angel

February

- Finally, we had a few warmer days in February that we used to our advantage. Our fingers now go numb after 20 minutes instead of 5. The roof was completed enough to pass as water-tight, and the insulation was put in.We started putting up the ceilings which was extremely exciting because it's progress that actually shows. The first few pics are Dad deciding that after I risked my life on the roof for a month there should probably be some pictures of me up there, so he forced me to put a smile on my face and fake them.

March

- When going back through all my photos and organizing them by month, March doesn't seem to exist. I don't really know what happened in March. I know I turned 28, Dad turned 70, and I'm guessing this is the month we put up all the drywall upstairs. Oh, and I think I almost died from a four day long flu. Luckily I had a little man bake me some cookies to make me feel better.

One of my besties, Laura, came to visit for my birthday and gave me two things I love most: fresh flowers and interior design magazines.

I plastered a smile on my face but wanted to cry because I'm getting so close to 30!

April

Another slow month for pictures. I think this was right around when I didn't have a camera to work with. We continued installing the ceilings throughout the house. They are 6" tongue and groove pine. It isn't a hard job, just an extremely time-consuming job. We also installed the new windows upstairs in the old part of the house.

May

- So many wonderful things happened in May! My baby girl turned one and a lot of visible progress was made on the house. We finished the ceilings upstairs and started installing the wood for the walls upstairs. The look I am going for is an east coast beach house. I love the look of everything painted white with wood floors and painted furniture. Can't wait for those reveals! We worked on the walls room by room and finally ripped the porch off! Yahoo! I nagged for that for months!

Another visitor (third dead bird found in the house)

Those ceilings cover up a lot of ugliness!

"It's too early and I hate my life right now!" Ha!

One good thing about the snow was that it hid the fact that my yard looks like a dump.

No more porch!

This is what I saw when I first looked at the house two years ago.

Started the walls in the master bedroom

Convinced Dad to cut down a tree that was leaning on another tree in my front yard. Lumberjack Dad did it again!

I hate killing trees but it looks so much better. Now the remaining tree can thrive.

June

- We continued to work on the walls room by room and eventually completed the walls upstairs. The difference is dramatic and really makes you feel good until you start adding up the work still left to be done. Because Caleb worked so hard on the Little Cape Cod this year, I felt it was only right to give him the credit for building it.

July

- Another busy month passed as we got ready for lots of family visits at the end of the month. Caleb turned four years old and officially became a "big boy." Dad and I installed the walls in the living/dining room and kitchen. When we ran out of boards and money to buy more, we worked on the outside of the house. We used leftover insulation and strapping to prepare the exterior for siding. I have every room in this house planned out and I can't wait to reveal them to you individually. My plan for the living room and dining room is to have the boards three quarters of the way up the wall with woods wallpaper at the top. The far wall is boarded to the ceiling because it will have an electric fireplace centered with built-in cabinets and bookcases on either side. I can't wait to get to that part! For now, I just want to keep my house.

Here is the living/dining room. The stairs to the basement will be built to the right of the room (open to let the natural light in) and go down in front of the windows.

My hobby/passion/zen place for the past ten years has been designing the floorplans of my dream house. I take my favourite sets from movies and t.v. shows and draw them on paper. I'm pretty good at guesstimating dimensions and using pictures from all different angles to figure out the floorplan. When I designed my house, I took all the elements from all my favourite sets and combined them with the house I bought and what I had to work with to create my floorplan. My favourite t.v. set kitchen layout has always been the kitchen from Brothers and Sisters and my favourite style is the beach house from Revenge. You can check those and tons of other sets out at one of my favourite blogs: www.hookedonhouses.net

This will be the kitchen. I hope you are able to visualize what I do.

Now that I have reached July, there are a few insider tidbits of information I'd like to share with you/make sure you understand because this is not as easy as it looks.

1. There was no electricity except one plug or running water (ever) in the house. That means, we packed a lunch every single day. If I have to eat another cheese or balogna sandwhich I may become suicidal! Not only that, bathroom breaks were runs to the gas station where I had to remove Caleb's entire snowsuit before he peed his pants. You might say this delayed the potty training process. Joy!

2. That beam you see in the kitchen wasn't there when I bought the house. There is so much work in that place that isn't seen it's ridiculous! If you walked in the rooms upstairs before we jacked up the house and leveled the floors with that EXTREMELY heavy beam (another super dangerous job that Dad and I tackled on our own), you would have felt like you were in one of those zero-gravity rooms because you would be walking almost sideways. There are 13 steel posts in the basement of the old house now and a beam, which almost killed Charlotte and I, holding up the upstairs of the house.

3. If you look closely at the cuts around the outlets, lights, and ripped boards, you will see that it's not perfect. As an overachieving perfectionist (in an obsessive-compulsive-argument-causing way), this is hard for me to admit. I will have you know that we built this house with half the proper tools required and almost every one of the tools we did use came from yard sales.

For example, here is Dad ripping a board on our "table" saw that sits on the floor, doesn't have an on/off switch, with no guide. Figure out how straight a cut THAT gets you!

We made do.

We are getting tired!

August

- I've made it. This has been and probably will go down as the longest blog post ever. This month I was extremely strapped for cash to put into the house because my teaching contract ended and my new one does not begin until September. On the up side, I have three weeks off and plenty of time to spend with my kids and working on the house. We accomplished a lot this month. We finished small pieces of the walls we missed here and there, laid the floors in the master bedroom and hall upstairs, finished the walls in the kitchen, sanded the floors in the old part of the house, moved furniture around, and cleaned to prepare for an appraisal. This is the month I got (not my first, but my scariest) phone call threatening that the lien holders were going to force a sale if I didn't finish the house soon...very soon. Here's a quick update on that: The lien holder is the building material supplier. When they put on the lien, they put a stop to me buying any materials on credit until I pay them. Because I need to finish the house in order to have the mortgage money released to pay them and I need materials to finish the house, I'm what you call "between a rock and a hard place." Do you see the loop? This is why I am in the position I am in. I've already put every cent I made off my first house selling into the house and maxed out all my credit cards. I started this build with excellent credit and now I can't even qualify to consolidate my credit cards. It's pretty pathetic and embarrassing, but I know I'm not the only person to every find themselves in this situation. Enough with the negative! Here are some amazing updated pics. My dream is coming true...I just need to finish!

Future built-in fridge and pantry