The Ottawa Citizen article about my remodeled living room is now online, but available only to subscribers. I’m sorry that those of you who are outside the region won?t be able to read it!
To the Ottawa-area folks who missed it, go to your recycle bin and fish out the Homes section! Go!
It’s a pretty good article. I had to laugh at this part:
“We just hated the carpet. It was horrible,” recalls Mark, a producer and writer at CJOH-TV, who spent hours on his hands and knees one weekend in early April pulling handfuls of carpet staples out of the wood floor. [ed: MARK WAS NOT THE ONLY ONE DOING THE WORK. In fact, I was the one pulling staples out of the floor while he did the stuff that required more muscle.)
“It had been spit up on 100 times. It was beyond the point of cleaning,” he says.”
My lord. How embarrassing. Did everyone really need to know how terrible our carpet really was? Sure, it was ugly, but “beyond the point of cleaning?” It makes us sound like we live in a hovel, like we’re the kind of people whose kids who spit up all over the place shrug our shoulders and let it dry on the spot.
I can’t begin to speculate how many people I know personally, and on the periphery of my life, who didn’t need to know the horrific details of the state of our carpet and the origins of 99.9 per cent of the stains. Oh, I’m not talking about family, friends and neighbors. That’s a given I’m talking about the ladies at the post office, our dentist, CLIENTS, and co-workers – people down at the coffee shop and the cute guy at the bakery. Gadzooks.
Ottawa is not a big city. Word gets around. And now the truth is out! :)
I have to say that the article was good, but I wish they had published more photos, or at least one that compared the before and after views of the whole room. As a reader, I like to see really clear before and after shots, don’t you?
Unrelated: There was also a huuuuge grinning photo of me and two friends accompanying an article about Spins & Needles. They quoted me saying my pat line about crafting being revolutionary. Gawd, I should really stop saying that. Most embarrassingly, I am wearing the exact same t-shirt that I am in the aforementioned living room photo. And I didn’t notice it until it was pointed out to me today.
I assure you that I have more than one t-shirt.
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Saturday morning was spent hawking our stuff in the first yard sale we’ve had in about eight years. EIGHT YEARS of stuff was hauled out of the garage, basement, and from the various nooks and crannies of our rooms. It was all cleaned and priced.
Cleaning the things that had been stored in the garage was not fun. Mice had invaded the boxes and made nests out of old shoelaces and wrapping paper. In fact, I came across a palatial mouse house made out of a pile of shredded newspaper stuffed underneath a champagne glass. Now that’s living in style!
I washed everything in soapy water, hoping that it was enough to sanitize everything from the mouse poop. I did my best, and if anyone falls down sick from drinking out of those glasses – well, they should have washed them a superhot cycle of your dishwasher first.
The preparation took hours, days even, when I take in consideration how much time Mark and I spent in the basement. I think we made about $100.00, not including the $10.00 that was spent feeding the labour. I shudder to think how that breaks down into an hourly rate. But I think that we did ok, considering there were about a thousand other people in our part of town that had the exact same idea and hosted their own yard sales.
I am all yard-saled out. I am done. In addition to our own yard sale, I just finished a piece for our local paper about yard sales after having gone yard-saling (is that a word?) for the past three weekends. Enough is enough.
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We spent most of Sunday getting lost in and around Montreal. It’s the one city where you need two brains driving the car. And it’s not like Mark and I are stupid people. We can read French road signs. We can follow numbered highways. I am the most navigationally-challenged of the two, Mark is the son of a military navigator. He has no excuse. I can’t pinpoint what makes it such a challenge. For starters, I think Mark bought the Anglophones Joke Map of Montreal. It didn’t make sense to me, and it didn’t match what was actually unfolding outside my window. And no, I wasn’t holding it upside down.
Our goal was the Bio-dome and the Insectarium. The girls loved it. Their favourite part: watching one of the penguins let go a big white poop in the water. For me, both the dome and the insects were pretty interesting (i’ll pass on the pooping part), but I’m not sure if I’d make a trip just to go there again. It’s best combined with an overnight stay and other sightseeing.
Photos to come soon, but right now we’re off to the park before it gets too hot.
