I decided against going up to Kapuskasing for the Easter weekend which no doubt disappointed my family a little (hey, who wouldn’t be disappointed if they can’t see me?!) but they said they understood and I made it my mission to not just laze around all weekend long but to get some honest to goodness work done.
Friday started off swell…I helped Vero clean up the entire house for the arrival of her parents. Unfortunately she wasn’t feeling well all weekend. I let her nap while I hauled our new patio set into the backyard and assembled it. Special thanks to Nanny for helping out with the purchase of that particular patio set! It is quite the beauty. We picked up the Camden collection from Canadian Tire after extensive searching around town. Do you know that it’s pretty well impossible to find a patio set that doesn’t have a glass top? We hate glass tops. We finally stumbled across this beauty and decided upon it. Here’s to many years of good use! The assembling went well, other than the fact that I dropped a nut in between two planks on the deck and Lord knows where that ended up. I searched for twenty minutes!
We then went to Vero’s sister’s place for some excellent spaghetti and good conversation. Vero’s parents were staying until Wednesday as Andreane is returning home for the summer and they were helping her move out of her apartment.
Saturday morning I peered outside and it was raining. A perfect opportunity to paint the basement! I had been itching to paint the basement for awhile as it was holding back the dream of my concert posters on the wall, as well as hanging the TV on the wall. The basement consisted of one side painted in a light brown, the other in a colour that I like to call ‘shit brown’. No joke. I was tired of it. So I decided to match the paint job on the one wall to the other. Luckily I found an old bucket of paint that I brought to Home Depot so they could find a match. It wasn’t a perfect match, but it was the closest it could ever get!
Arriving home with some supplies, Danielle and Gaetan graciously offered to help and so we set up our work area, applied our first coat and stopped for lunch. I had purchased the expensive paint/primer in one and I’m not sure if I needed to. The Home Depot paint person indicated that I should be fine with regular paint with two coats, no primer but then I mentioned that I was thinking of the paint/primer combination and she thought I might be able to do it one coat. One coat definitely wasn’t enough when it came to changing a dark brown to a light brown. Either way, good to know for next time!
Early afternoon, the second coat of paint was applied (over top some nice dart holes in the wall!) and I put a fire on in the wood stove (no squirrels this time!) to warm up the basement and help speed up the drying process.
Onto the next project…mounting the TV! It took a lot of visualizing and a beer in hand to figure out exactly where I wanted to place it. I had to keep in mind the eye level of people sitting down as well as how I wanted shelving to appear on the wall around it. I settled on a certain distance and marked the wall and by that time Vero’s family had come back from shopping which was perfect timing.
Everything was set to go…I drilled the hole into the stud and then I was holding the wall mount in place while Gaetan was inserting the bolt. But he said it wasn’t grabbing to anything! What the heck? We pulled it off the wall, grabbed the stud finder, confirmed that we were in the stud and couldn’t figure out what was going on. In the end, we removed the electrical box on the wall and I fished my hand up the wall to find out that (with bad luck) we had hit a knot in the wood! Argh. No matter. Now that we knew about it we simply readjusted and everything worked out fine.
The TV on the wall is actually quite sweet. I didn’t realize I would love it’s aesthetic this much, but I really do feel a TV deserves to be mounted onto a wall. We even watched the Habs game that night on the television and there was excitement in the air (not because of the game, because of the TV!)
The next day we spent puttering around the house…I cleaned up the garage, cleaned the BBQ…I’m not really impressed with the BBQ at this moment…you can already see some areas that have rusted on the stainless steel…to the point where the grease trap broke off! I think I should have tried to clean the BBQ BEFORE the winter instead of afterward. Ah well, I have learned a lesson. I should also look for some BBQ cleaner spray which will cut the grease down. I used dishwasher soap which did the trick but I’m sure there is a foam out there that is easier to use.
Not going to lie, I set up the hammock and had a little nap outside as well. What a beautiful, beautiful day on Easter! Plus I made a batch of beer and saw a white bunny rabbit in my backyard that night! What are the odds of that happening on Easter!? Are white rabbits domestic? I thought so. I wonder if it had escaped? We also played a card game of Golf which everyone seemed to enjoy quite a bit.
The Easter weekend ended with us traveling around Ottawa looking for a few things…Ikea was one of our stops for some ideas of shelving. I finally became disgusted with the fact that the colours weren’t what we had in mind and I vowed to make my own bookshelves. This is quite the ambitious project and I didn’t kid myself into thinking it would take a few weeks. I figure as a novice woodworker with not many tools, this venture can take me an entire year. But I shall start out small like Dad suggested. Perhaps a small shelf, or a bookcase to get the feel of building something. Then I can move onto bigger and better things like making a hidden doorway to the storage area. Ha!