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The Crocus’ are coming

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I’m getting excited – one of my favorite seasons will soon be here – SPRING!

Ok truth be told I enjoy Spring, Summer and Autumn almost equally, well Autumn might be a little less on the fav scale but it’s up there compared to Winter! Oh and Winter will soon be over! Yeah!

I think plants celebrate when Spring arrives … maybe that’s why there are so many beautiful Spring flowers.

The Crocus is always the first flower to appear on my property each spring … aren’t they pretty?

Purple Crocus

Lovely little flowers of purple and yellow that bloom during the day and then close their blooms as night falls.

Another spring flower that I enjoy is the Columbine or Aquilegia. Such pretty ornate flowers.

Aquilegia

When I was a kid we’d go up to our cottage almost every weekend from Spring through fall and often in the forest I’d find red flowers that my mother told me were called Honeysuckles. I think they were some form of wild Columbine. I guess that was my first introduction to Aquilegia.

Do you have a favorite Spring flower? Oh and what’s your favorite season .. if you have seasons, that is?





Our bedroom is freezing!

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I’m so glad that winter is almost over! Yesterday it reached 18 Celsius (64 F) in the afternoon … but in a few days we’ll be back to the usual cold March weather. Hopefully this March won’t be as bad as last year! I remember a few snow storms and one of the worst of the year happened in March of last year.

Other than going outside in the cold I dislike the cold winter months because our main bedroom, upstairs, is the coldest room in the house. I wrote a post about it recently on my main blog – talking about how I hate getting ready for bed in the room because it’s so chilly that I end up covered in goosebumps! Some of my readers on the other blog suggested a variety of things but the main suggestion was to use a heated blanket. While that’s a great suggestion for once we get into bed, it does nothing to help with the too cool room.

When we first moved into our house in June of 2001 we noticed that the main bedroom – at the end of a long hallway far away from the stairs, didn’t have any cold air return. So we had some duct work done and had a cold air return added to the room. I’m sure that helped, but we still had drafts in the room once winter came.

A couple of years after we moved in we decided to tear down two of the bedroom walls … well the plaster anyway, to find the source of the drafts. We plugged up a few cracks that we found in the triple brick in the top of the wall near the ceiling and some near the base of the wall and then used drywall to close up the wall again. That fix made the room quite a bit warmer than it had been, but it’s still cooler than the rest of the house.

Since the room is cool in the winter we’ve always used some kind of electric heater to warm the room for an hour or so once we got to bed. We turn it on for a while prior to going to bed and since it has a timer on it we set it to run for about an hour after we’ve gone to bed. That helps quite a bit, but unfortunately our heater stopped working so we now need a new one. Believe me … that heated blanket is becoming more and more appealing!

We obviously still have some air leaks in the room because the room is too warm in the summer as well. Maybe we’ll have to tear down all the walls to find any other cracks that we missed.

Do any of you have the same problem? Is your bedroom a lot cooler than the rest of your house?

Our messy basement

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We haven’t set an exact date yet, but sometime in April we’re going to have our oil tank replaced. Prior to that we have to clean out our basement so that the work can be done.

I’m not looking forward to the clean up!

We’ve lived in our house since 2001 but because we started doing renovations from the first day we owned the house we still have a lot of stuff stored in the basement that hasn’t even been unpacked from our move! Plus there’s tons of renovation materials – extra wood, paints, sanding stuff – way more than a normal household would need, but enough for one that’s undergoing renovations.

When my Mom died in 2004 we divided up furniture and other things from my parents house between my three brothers, my sister and I. Since I’m the youngest and being a fairly new home owner I got more furniture than my siblings. Of course, as I said above, we’re still trying to renovate our house, so most of the items I got from my parents house are stored in the basement as well.

All of this has resulted in a very jam packed basement! I really should take some pictures just to show you the furniture and boxes piled up on top of one another. It’s so bad I really hate going into the basement to do laundry, get food from the freezer or use the washroom down there.

We have a lot of cleaning to do over the next month! I think that once we start going through all the stuff down there we’ll end up throwing out or giving away at least half of it. Hmmm … if the weather stays nice maybe we could have a yard sale.

What I’d like, once the basement is cleaned out and hopefully half the stuff has been disposed of, and once the new oil tank is in, is to have a useable area in the basement. We don’t have money to renovate it just yet, but eventually I’d like to set it up like a den with nice home theater furniture and home theater system down there. Now that would be nice.

It’s a shame … our house is fairly small, and we have all this space in the basement but we can’t really use it for anything because we’ve been using it as a storage area for things that we’ll probably never use.

Do you have a place in your home that’s like that too .. maybe the garage, the basement or a specific room? Or maybe it’s your attic that’s jam packed with things that you put away years ago thinking you’d use them again sometime in the future?

It’s snowing …. Again!

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Well, I guess I can’t complain all that much that it’s snowing yet again. We’ve had a fairly nice week with temperatures either well above freezing or only just a little below freezing. All the snow that we had melted away. Nice for February … but the nice weather is over for a while.

Chris and I were trying to beat the storm this afternoon. We figured tomorrow would pretty much be a right off for going out and getting the groceries and other shopping done due to the storm, so we headed out late this afternoon before the snow started.

We had planned to go to Andy’s meat terminal off of Warden avenue to get two bags of boneless skinless chicken breasts. Man it’s a deal – 12 to 14 huge chicken breasts for about $35 bucks! The breasts are so big that we only eat one between us so each bag is 12 to 14 meals. Since we’ve been eating so much chicken lately we thought we’d get two bags. That’s a lot of chicken!

Well after we left the meat place we saw a Sportschek store and since Chris has come home complaining of sore feet and sore knees after every work shift for oh the last two or three months we decided to stop in and see if we could find him some good running shoes – well walking shoes since that’s what he does all day. Not only did Chris get a new pair of running shoes but I did too. The ones I’ve been wearing were at least two or three years old and they make my feet sore when I wear them while walking around a lot too. So … over $200 bucks later and we were out of the store and on to Costco to fill my prescriptions and pick up a few other items we needed.

By the time we left Costco at just after 6 pm the snow was falling hard. The city snow plows and sand/salters hadn’t been on any of the major roads were driving on yet either so it was a slippery drive home. It’s times like these that I wish we were on one of those Vegas vacations so we could escape the snow. Now that would be nice.

I think sometime in the middle of next week it’s supposed to warm up again so maybe this snow dump will all melt away again.

Ah … I can’t wait for spring!

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