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This weekend is nearly over, and it’s been all about the house. Yesterday, we spent the majority of the day out and about, shopping for different things. We tried to find the clearance store for kitchen backsplash tiles, but they weren’t open yet, so we took a trip to Home Depot (to two of them, actually) to find a melamine panel that matched our cabinets. Our plan is to create a shelving area between where our kitchen cabinets end, and where the countertop ends, so that we can eventually tile across the whole width of the countertop. Well it turns out that neither Home Depot have the melamine panels we need in the right color (Beech), so that project was put on temporary hold, along with the kitchen tiles.

Today I managed to install a dimmer switch for our pot lights, my first electrical project in the new house, and it actually turned out just fine. The bad news is that while shutting off the switch at the fuse box in the cellar, I blew out one of the recepticals in the same room. And even worse, it was the receptical powering our TV, cable box, Playstation3, and Xbox360, so we had to maneuver our way to a different power outlet to get power to them. I went to Home Depot and picked up a new receptical (one with test/reset buttons), but couldn’t for the life of me get the grounding wire around the screw while installing it. I was running out of daylight so I decided to wait for tomorrow to try it once more before I inevitably call in an electrician to put together a measly power outlet for me. We’ll see how it goes.

Until next time!

And the weekend is gone not as quick as it arrived, but quicker. Saturday was spent helping our beloved cousin Karen (*cough*sarcasm*cough*).. ahem… pardon me. As I was saying, we spent Saturday helping Karen and her parents move boxes and small items (i.e. anything that wasn’t a table, shelf, or large item) into their new home. It was a great time, and we even got a free lunch at All-Star Wings, a great wings place that’s right around the corner from our house and that I didn’t even know existed. They have more flavors than you can fit in a barrel and of course, it was delicious.

Today was finally finishing the painting in our house. We touched up a lot of white spots showing through, finished the first floor hallway, and painted the front entrance. Then we got rid of the painter’s tape that was still littering our home, and wow, it’s all finally done. It’s really quite unbelievable. Anyway, afterwards we watched some great Red Sox Baseball vs. the Toronto Blue Jays, and cheered (at least I did) as they won. We watched as much of the Patriots game as we could, but around 5:30 it was time to head to Nadia’s grandparents house for a big family dinner. We had a great time, and are stuffed with food! Luckily I was able to watch the remainder of the Patriots game, and saw them finish off the Jets. Brett who?

And now, it’s Sunday night, and we’re both beat. I think I’ll sleep in an extra hour tomorrow morning.

Cheers!

Here’s the first round of “finalized room” pictures. The red room is our living room for reading and your basic sit down and relax, the blue room is our family room for, you know, watching TV and stuff.

Since the last time I posted, we’ve moved all of our possessions from our condo at North York to our new house in Markham, we’ve (almost) finished painting everything, and have just been a barrel full of busy.

Sometime during the hectic week, I got the very sad news that our family friend Barbara Peterson passed away exactly one week after we had seen her in South Hadley, seemingly as healthy as ever. It was very sudden and unexpected, and the world as a whole will be a lesser place without her in it. My deepest sympathies go out to her family. She was one of those kind women who would not only never hurt a fly, she’d help it fly away if it were injured.

Today, my father-in-law and I exchanged a broken chandelier with a new one from Canadian Tire. We brought it back to the house and installed it, and the living room is actually now the second completely finished room. It looks fantastic, and pictures will come soon. The first room completely finished was the family room. Bathrooms are done too. Really the only rooms remaining to be finished are the two spare bedrooms (one being the computer room I’m currently sitting in right now), and the master bedroom. Awesome.

Last but certainly not least, I want to extend a huge “Thank You!” to all of the family that helped out during our move. Nadia’s mother and father have been a critical component to helping us move during the entire week, bringing in their expertise and muscles wherever required. Karen was a huge help in cleaning out our old condo and setting things up in the new place, Kin helped us out big time with organizing our kitchen and moving boxes filled with our “stuff” to the right rooms, and Miranda spent her afternoon helping yours truly follow the seemingly arbitrary IKEA instructions on putting together our new sofa, and did a lot of the work installing our electronics in the family room. Terence made perhaps the biggest sacrifice of all, in that his will to help us move terribly large items was stronger than his back muscles, and ended up having a painful afternoon and evening (followed by an even more painful following day, I’m sure).

Thanks so much to everyone!!! We couldn’t have done it without you.

More to come.

Today I’ll be picking up a few new lights for our house, one being a chandelier, and also a couple of kitchen lights. We’ll install those sometime next week. I’m going to be rolling on our first coat of paint for our master bedroom today as well, as Nadia and her father did all of the trim work over the weekend. If I remember to bring my camera, I’ll take some photos when I’m done.

Nadia, Karen, Mrs. Lui and I are all hopping in a car tomorrow and heading over to my old stomping grounds bright and early tomorrow morning to celebrate our wedding with my family (sort of a second wedding reception, if you will). I absolutely cannot wait to see everyone again, it’s been too long! I have a lot of relatives coming from all over, even one from South Carolina to see me and to meet my beautiful wife for the first time. It’s going to be so much fun, but the fun only lasts for a few days as we have to pack up again and leave on Sunday morning. C’est la vie.

So there probably won’t be any posts for the remainder of the week unless I find some time while I’m back at home in Massachusetts. Cheers.

Here are just a few pictures of the painting that we did over the weekend.

So on Friday we got our keys to the new house, and we began to clean up the place to prep for painting. Yesterday, we managed to paint the entire family and living room, and I’ve got to say it looks really great. Pictures will come soon as I will bring my camera with us today, and for those of you living in the US, you’ll be happy to see the color choices.

There are a couple of things we need to do before moving in entirely, like install a shower head in the second bathroom upstairs, and fix the hot water in the sink in the same bathroom. We also are going to change the water pressure for the house. Once that’s done, all we have left to do is cleaning and moving in the furniture.

Okay, off to paint the master bedroom!

Today we get the keys to our new house! We’ll be picking them up sometime this afternoon and we may even get to start the painting today as well.

Exciting times!

The house will be ours this Friday. Going to Home Depot to get the buckets of paint today (and rollers), and this weekend we’ll be at the new house cleaning up and rubbing down the walls of dust for painting. Hopefully we’ll get a bunch of the painting done too, but there’s a lot to get done. We’re painting the family room, the living room, the hallways (upstairs and downstairs), and the master bedroom. Colors are a warm red for the living room (the first room you enter from the front door), shale blue for the family room, a light tan or beige for the hallways (staying with a neutral color there), and “sage green” for the master bedroom.

The painting will be about 80% of what we plan to do, the other 20% being new lights for the kitchen and bringing in all the furniture. I’ll most likely be going back and forth next week while Nadia is at work so I can get the work done that we need to before we head down to South Hadley! Oh boy I can’t wait… sucks that we’ll only be staying in Massachusetts for about 4 days (including driving there and back, so only 3 days really), but it’ll be time well spent.

Oh, here’s some huge news for me but not so much for anyone else really: Star Trek Online is in bigtime development now after being picked up by Cryptic Studios from Perpetual Entertainment. It’s release date isn’t known, but is estimated it could be as soon as Q4 of 2009… yeah I know that’s like a year from now, but whatever… haha. They have a gameplay trailer up too, and it’s footage taken directly from the game as they have it right now. No rendered scenes, no scripted playing. Pure demo footage. Gotta love it.

Oh yeah, one more thing. A while ago I posted some information on a collaborative idea called Cquestrate, which was about adding lime to seawater to reduce CO2 emissions in the atmosphere. Well one of the people who works for them actually visited this very website and posted a comment! Check it out here: http://brianirish.com/2008/07/21/cquestrate-an-interesting-environmental-idea/. Totally cool that he took the time to do that, in my opinion. Should be even more of a reason to check out their website! http://www.cquestrate.com/

Okay that’s all for me. Cheers.

Holmes on Homes

I never knew HGTV was such a worthwhile channel until I became a homeowner. By far, my favorite show (as Nadia is well aware of) is Holmes on Homes. In the United States, the show is on TLC I believe… Anyway, there are full episodes online from Seasons 5, 6 and 7 if you can’t catch any on the television. You can check them out here. Mike Holmes (the host) is invited by families to their houses after contractors have come in and f*cked everything up and left, often causing huge financial problems for the family. Holmes brings in his crew, usually ends up tearing everything apart (this is the most entertaining part, watching his reaction as he uncovers really shoddy construction), and rebuilds everything. His motto “Make It Right” is what he goes by as he delivers the final product, often going above and beyond what the homeowner was expecting.

Anyway, I could go on and on about this show, but you probably have better things to do. Yesterday morning Nadia and I went to brunch at Karen’s place with all of the cousins, as it was to serve as a “goodbye” to their house. Her parents have sold it and purchased a new house, so as they are very excited for the new house, they are getting ready to say goodbye to 25 years of memories.

A little bit of website work done today, going to begin working on taking down some shelving in our apartment to get ready for the move. Wow – only 4 more days until we officially own a house. Can you believe it?