Our new project is for a new bathroom. At the moment our laundry cupboard where the washer and dryer goes backs onto a half bath (toilet & sink). We are going to swing the laundry side round which will then allow us to extend the bathroom back further giving us space to install a shower cubicle.

This will mean we have two full baths on the main floor which will be great when family visit as they can have their own bathroom. Fortunately we have enough room in our hall/lobby area to be able to do this. Chris has made a start by demoing all the existing walls and reconstructing the laundry cupboard. He will also install a new door from the guest bedroom which will allow them access straight into the bathroom. We are debating whether to wait for the January sales to get the shower, sink etc. We want to get it done and out of the way, but if we can save a few bucks by waiting a few weeks then it might be worth it. It will be just our luck that the items we want won’t be on sale!

On another note it is snowing well this afternoon and the weather man said we might get ice rain later which won’t be very nice. Ice rain is a real pig as it is heavy ice which can bring down power lines and trees. Lets hope it bypasses us. However, the snow does make everything very Christmassy!

The temperatures are still really nice, in fact on Wednesday it was 32C, a bit cooler today at 25C, so really pleasant and the forecast says it will be like this for some time to come. Apparently July and August have been some of the hottest and driest since records began. We have had hardly any rain and the farmers are really feeling it, as our the lawns and wells.

Yesterday we were driving along and noticed that some of the trees are starting to change colour. This is both good and bad: good because it looks stunning in the autumn here, and bad because it does mean the end of summer.

On another note, Chris has started to attack our future home cinema room. He is boxing in the areas that will carry the projector and sorted out a lot of the wiring. He has also started the dry walling, so things are progressing. We are in no hurry to complete it, so can take our time. (I keep saying our!)

Last year we renovated half the basement, but left the other as we just did not know what to do with it. Well, the other day Chris had the great idea of turning one of the rooms into a home cinema room. We had considered this option before but never got around to it, so we are going to do it now.

We should get a lot of enjoyment out of it as we like watching films and if or when we do decide to sell it should be a selling feature to the buyer – particularly the man. The woman will hopefully like the kitchen and the man the home cinema – there’s marketing for you!

So, that is our new project – did I say “our”?

Currently the room looks like this…Stay tuned for updates!

We had our house valued by a three agents and all came up with the same price, so it must be about right. We are very pleased as the price is actually more than we thought, which is always a bonus. It seems that the work we have put into the house, especially the basement being almost finished and the granite in the kitchen has paid off. One of the agents who came round was originally from Scotland and another from Germany, so us immigrants get everywhere!

We spent Friday night on the computer looking for possible houses to buy. Because we are not tied down to one area we ended up looking at places as far west as Port Hope/Rice Lake to Prescott to the east. We spent hours driving round all the properties and viewing them from the outside to see if we wanted to progress to viewing the inside.

This is a definite bonus of actually living here. When we came in April last year to view houses before landing, we had an endless list of properties, all of which our fantastic realtor booked us in to see. Many of which we knew were wrong as soon as we saw them from the outside. Now we are here we can drive around at our leisure and know instantly if we like it or not from the outside. This cuts out lots of wasted time on our part and the realtors.

One house we saw from the outside and liked turned out to be absolutely enormous on the inside. The land was great as it was four acres and lots of it woodland, so that was great, but the interior of the house would have needed major modernising and quite a bit of money spending on it. It was so huge that if I had started cleaning it, I think I would just about have finished it before needing to start all over again. The owners of the house were also from the UK and had moved to Canada fifty years ago. We had a lovely chat with them, so not all was wasted.

By the end of Monday night we had spend three days driving literally hundreds of km in search of a house and fund none that we felt good enough about to take further. Today I phoned the realtor who we will use to sell with to explain that we dare not put our house on the market for fear of not finding a suitable house to buy.

She said that we are now approaching the slower time in real estate in Canada and we might be better to wait until the spring when the market picks up. People here tend to put houses on the market in the spring after the snows giving then time to sell and buy during the summer holidays. This way then end up moving during the kids holidays and the kids can start new schools etc if needed in September.

We will keep our eyes open, but have put moving on a semi-backburner for now.

All our animals are still keeping us entertained. Thanks for the comments about them all and the warnings of us getting too friendly with them, we just can’t help it though.

Our very bold chipmunk is now quite happy to sit with us on the front step and we no longer have to feed him at arms length. He just comes right up to us and is not bothered at all. Several other chips are getting closer, but won’t quite take from our hands yet.

We are waiting to see chipmunk and squirrel babies, which apparently will be coming out soon. We may have already seen some, but we are not sure how much smaller they are from the adults, so it is hard to say.

Most of the grackle babies have now gone their own way, as are the blue jays. We have one lovely baby cardinal who eats at our place most days. He is a pink colour as his red colour will develop over time.

We had finished the sunroom first and then completed the office. On Wednesday the carpet fitters came and fitted to carpet down the stairs and in the lobby part of the basement – we don’t know what to call this bit!

It really looks great now. On Saturday we went shopping and bought bits to finish everything off. Things like pictures, plants etc. We are going to order a large bookcase to put my collection of books. I have updated some pics in the album. We are really pleased with the whole thing. I have to say that my husband is quite brilliant at DIY and has done an excellent job. My painting skills obviously played a part too!

Today the granite man came to take our new sink away with him so he can get the hole cut out. We had got the fitting of the counter top in for 19th Dec, but he said he can fit us in on Tuesday afternoon, so I am getting my granite much sooner than anticipated.

We pick the girls up tomorrow for their two week visit, so we will be busy from now till Christmas. We have trips to Toronto and New York planned, so we hope the weather stays good.

All the drywall has been done and primed. I have painted the sunroom in a nice sunny lemon, which looks really nice. We are going to put wood on the ceiling so that should really make he sunroom look nice.

Today I also bought some furniture to go in the sunroom, which can also be taken outside to the patio, so that room is near completion.

The fourth bedroom that we will be using as an office is also near completion. The walls have been painted; just the finishing touches to do and that room will be done.

The stairs were a nightmare to complete as the person who fitted the original stairs had offset them from the wall and they weren’t straight. We have had to completely redo the stairs and it has taken ages to get them to look decent. We are just about there now, so that is a relief.

The large room that you enter at the bottom of the stairs of which part will be a library (well a large bookcase anyway) just needs painting and finishing.

The huge family room will have to wait until after Christmas as we will not have time to complete before.

We had the carpet people out yesterday to quote for the stairs and the main room at the bottom and it will be fitted next week.

At the weekend we visited a fellow ex-pat who happens to live nearby. I won’t mention any names but we had a nice visit with him, his wife and two lovely children. The eldest little girl was a delight and wanted to show us the whole house, all her toys and read all her books to us. However, she soon got bored with us and went off to play on her computer. Thanks xxxx for your hospitality.

We had our septic tank pumped today – bet you wanted to know that! We had no idea when it was last done and were advised that it should be emptied about every 4-5 years. As the house was 4 years old, we figured if it hadn’t been done before it probably needed doing now. Better to be safe than sorry. It turned out it was pretty full, so a good job we called them out. It was rather stinky whilst they did it though!!!

We had our oil tank refilled (it was about half full) and it cost us $188, which we didn’t think was too bad. We will keep an eye on it to see how long it lasts and how much we pay over the winter.

I also decided that I would like to replace our laminate kitchen worktops for granite. We have such a lovely kitchen now – well I think so! So we thought it would do it justice to put granite in place.

This morning I drove to Kingston to see a guy I had been speaking to on the phone who gave me the best vibes after phoning several and getting really annoyed with Home Depot.

Home Depot advertises prices starting at $52 sq ft fully installed. The one I chose turned out to be nearly a $100 sq ft, not a problem – my choice. However it turns out that if I order it, they come out to measure up (at a cost of $100 which is refunded if you go ahead) and all existing countertops have to be removed first. Then you have to go to Toronto to choose your slab, then it takes them 8 weeks to fit. You once again have to remove the counter tops yourself. But that is not all. The edging you choose is also at an additional cost as is the sink cutout. They will not fit the sink, even if you buy it from them and will not plum. Total cost for my choice was nearly $7k. Goodbye home Depot.

The guy I went to see this morning quoted for fully installed, so I went over there to choose my granite – oh boy, what a choice. They had over 300 samples of colour alone. Eventually they let me take a few samples home so I could try them in situ. So I drove home with half a dozen granite samples.

When I got home, hubby and I laid them out in the kitchen and decided which to buy. Unfortunately, the one I really liked was the dearest – obviously, but it made it worse because that was the one hubby like best too.

When I looked at my email, the guy had sent me a message, saying that he could offer me a better rate on the one we liked as his stockist was closing down and needed to get rid of stock. So, in the end we are getting a much nicer granite than we thought we could afford for just over $5,300k, fully installed, with edging included and they fit the sink. Marvelous.

He is coming out in the next few days to measure up and will install in the next couple of weeks. Extra marvelous!

It has been cold and wet again this week. Last night we had snow flurries again, but not too much and it had disappeared as soon as the sun came up this morning.

We bought a new TV for the spare bedroom for when the kids come to visit next month (the kids, by the way are in their early 20’s). It is a 32” inch and looks so small compared with the 52” we have in the living room, but it is the same size as the main TV we had in the UK!

We also bought a PSP games thingy. In the UK we had a Playstation, but although we liked playing it, because it was part of the TV we rarely used it. We decided here to have a portable one as it is a simple case of turn it on and away we go.

I also got a new tabletop oven or toaster oven as they are called here. I mentioned before about not getting double ovens here and having to buy a separate grill. However this causes a lot of smoke and smells, so I decided I needed a toaster oven and it is brilliant. It is a large one, you can fit two 12” pizzas in it and worth every penny so far. It has a convection oven, so cooks many other things quicker than my big oven and will also broil (grill) bake and has a rotisserie too. I seem to be using it for everything and it does not smoke or smell, great.

We started out in the morning after a hearty breakfast at Denny’s, then just followed our noses. There are some simply beautiful lakes around this area and we kept stopping off to take a look and take the odd picture.

It is really nice just to take a drive as you often don’t venture too far from home and miss out on many things, which are really close by.

We did this the other week when we went down onto Prince Edward County and visited the Sandbanks area. This is a stunning bit of coastline and we are thrilled to have a great beach so close. It will be a nice place to take my aunt and uncle when they come over next year from Spain – not sure if we can compete with Spain though?

Anyone know of any other really nice locations in the area?

Yesterday we booked flights for hubby’s daughter and her friend to come over in December. They are coming over on the 4th and staying till the 19th. They want to visit Niagara Falls, Toronto, New England etc. We are happy to take them to these places depending on what the weather is like at this time. If there is six foot of snow, then maybe not!

I am sitting looking out of the window and we have a sudden influx of American Robins in the garden. We had thought that they had all left for the winter as we hadn’t seen any for a while, but there are about 20 in the garden at the moment. We have also seen loads of Dark Eyed Juncos which a lovely little birds.

It is pouring with rain today – again, so probably won’t be going too far today. Hubby also wants to get the drywall for the basement but needs to wait until the weather is better to avoid it becoming wetwall.

Since having the snow shower last week we have finally got a generator which hubby now has to install – very technical and I have no idea, so will say no more about it! Hopefully the next time we are without power, we will be able to use the generator and hardly notice.

We have also been out a purchased some winter coats ready for the colder weather. I just need to get some warm boots and I think we will be kitted out for winter. Whilst looking we noticed come boots advertising that they were good for temperature down to -35C, I hope we won’t need them!

I forgot to mention that we received our medical cards a couple of weeks ago. They arrived a few days before our three-month anniversary of landing. This means we now have all our required paperwork and cards.

Hubby is still working on the basement and now has all the wall studding completed and has hung three French doors. It is amazing how different it looks, even with just that done. It should look great once the walls are completed and the carpet is laid.

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