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I’m getting sick of these four walls

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I think I’m starting to go a little stir crazy! I’ve mostly been stuck inside the house for the last couple of weeks and I’m tired of the view! LOL

As my regular readers know I have Crohn’s disease and I’ve been on medical leave from my job as an ER nurse for five years now. Unfortunately I can add a bad back into my list of woes now too. I found out about a year ago that I have a herniated disc in my lower back so the last year I’ve had a lot of back pain and a numb left thigh.

My back got really bad on Christmas evening. I’d spent the previous two or three days cleaning the house from top to bottom in order to prepare for three rounds of house guests during the holiday season and then standing cooking all day on Christmas day must have just been the last straw for my back.

Sitting during Christmas dinner was excruciating. You see when I stand too long it seems to make my tailbone go out and sitting or moving around becomes extremely painful. To top everything off, the next day I got new symptoms – my numb left thigh got even number and then my left thigh started burning – as if I was standing with my leg pressed against a radiator or something extremely hot.

So now if I stand for as little as 15 minutes my thigh starts burning! It’s an awful feeling! Luckily if I go and lie down on my side with my legs bent (sort of like a fetal position) the burning subsides.

Now … two weeks or more later I haven’t done a lot of sitting. I’m stuck inside the house because can’t stand or walk for long without everything getting worse … but, thanks to lying down a lot my back, tailbone and leg seem to be quite a bit better.

I did go out on Sunday … we bought a new front loading high efficiency washer and dryer set at a local furniture store. While we were there we looked at the new HDTV sets and some contemporary sofas. I know our TV is going to die sometime this year so we thought it would be a good idea to figure out which models we like … as for the sofas … well … if we ever do get around to renovating the basement I think I’ll bring our living room couch, sofa and chair set downstairs and get a new sofa for the living room.

We have NO money … but hey .. I can dream … and that little outing to the store- while it was hard on my back – was nice. It alleviated some of the boredom I’d been feeling by having to be stuck at home lying down all the time because of my bad back.

Have you ever been stuck at home for a few weeks (or months) due to illness or something like a bad back? I know for some people being stuck at home in bed for even a day or so can drive them nuts – so imagine weeks!





Time to finish up our home renovation projects

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Now that the weather is getting nicer I guess it’s about time we get back to work on our home renovations.

We’ve spent quite a bit of time cleaning out our basement over the last few weeks. In a week, on April 13th, we’re going to have our oil tank replaced. What a pain in the butt cleaning out a basement that’s been used mainly for storage is! There are so many things we stored away thinking we’d use them once the rest of the house was renovated that have been sitting down there since we moved in, in 2001! I guess if we haven’t found a way to use some of those items in the past 8 years we probably won’t even when our reno is done.

My goal, for now, is just to make the basement usable. We have a sectional couch downstairs and if we can clear the clutter enough to make a decent sized usable space we could set up the couch so it could be used. It has a pull out bed as well – which would be great if we have a lot of house guests. The basement is so nice and cool in the summer that it would be nice to be able to spend some time down there. We’d probably save some money on air-conditioning too if we spent more time in the basement during the hot days of summer!

The next real reno I want us to work on is the kitchen! I hate the cupboards in our tiny kitchen. The previous owners obviously did a kitchen makeover a while before they sold the house but they did it cheaply. The cupboards are melamine and I think they’re ugly. I want to replace the cupboards and arrange them differently … well actually I want to arrange the whole kitchen differently as right now the only place to put our fridge is on the empty wall between the back door and the basement door and it blocks both doors! I also want to look for some cool door hardware online, something interesting that will personalize the look of our cupboards etc.

First we need to finish the living room/ dining room renovations! We still need to put up the tin ceiling tiles that we bought oh … 7 years ago! Then all we need to do is replace the baseboard moldings and quarter round trim and the job will finally be done. At least we have most of the materials for that … yes they are stored in our over-crowded basement!

Are you planning any home renovations this Spring? If so what rooms are you planning to redo?

We’ve just got to finish our living room renovation

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We have to finish renovating our living room and dining room area soon. We started the renovations to these rooms in 2003 and then my mother died, my sister had an operation and ended up in a coma and Chris and I both got sick. Chris is better now, but I’m still sick so we just haven’t gotten back into renovating our home.

We probably won’t do anything now that it’s starting to get cold here, as it’s much nicer to do renovations when you can have the windows open or get outside for a break from the dust, paint fumes and so on. But … next spring … I mean it – whether I’m healthy again or not we just have to start working on getting the reno done!

We have people come to the door and they look up at our ceiling that’s covered in wood strapping just waiting for the tin ceiling panels to be nailed on to them and they say “oh you’re going for that rustic unfinished look, eh?”. Uh huh …

Plus I’m dying to get some new furniture. I’ll probably decorate with modern furniture. I saw this really cool couch at one of the stores on the Danforth that I’d love to get for our living room. I’ll have to go there again and take a photo of it so that I can show you. It would be nice to see if you guys like it as much as I do!

The furniture that we are using in our living room now is leather and it’s huge! I think that we’ll move that furniture into the basement (when we refinish that too) and create a home theater / rec room area down there.

Have you renovated your home on your own? Did you ever stall like we have?

Need to find better ways to cool our home

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Now that it’s finally get warm outside here in Toronto I’ve come to realize that we need to find a better way to keep the house cool in the summer.

We have window air conditioners, but they seem to only cool half the house. If I go upstairs into the non- air conditioned spare bedroom on the south side of the house it’s almost as hot as if we didn’t have any air conditioning at all. Same for our kitchen which also faces south.

I have curtains in the kitchen and a roman blind in the spare bedroom, but I’m thinking about getting some wood blinds so that I can use them to block some of the strong sunlight that comes into both of those rooms in the morning and early afternoon.

I figure if I can keep those two rooms a little cooler the rest of the house will be cooler too and perhaps we might even be able to turn the air conditioning down a notch or two.

Beautiful interior wood doors for your home

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I believe that one day I’ll be able to say that we’ve completely renovated just about every inch of our home. I’ve made plans for each area and completed a number of major renovations so far, however it will still likely be a few years before I can make my claim.

One of the areas I’ve yet to address are interior and exterior doors. Our home was built in 1927 and I believe all of the interior doors are the original doors – complete with ancient hardware. Needless to say, doors that are 81 years old tend to have several coats of paint and a number of dings in them! As much as I like our doors I think we might replace a few of them. The rest I’ll try to refinish.

If you happen to be revamping or renovating your home you might want to take a look at the selection of Interior Wood Doors at Hardwood Door & Bevel.

Not only does Hardwood Door & and Bevel have a wide selection of beautifully designed interior and exterior hardwood doors, wrought iron doors, French doors, bevels, windows and hardware they will also create a custom door for you if you need a very specific height or width or have a custom design in mind.

As I said our house was built in the 1920’s and the interior and entry doors are narrower than those in more modern homes. We might well have to get a custom door ourselves, or at the very least trim to sides of a pre-made door.

I spent some time on the site looking over the various styles of doors which range from hardwood doors of Oak, Maple, Mahogany, Cherry and distressed Alder to wrought iron and Rio Tuscany doors, solid MDF doors and various collections listed by brand and or style of door and I was pleased with the designs.

I also took a look at some of the custom doors that they’ve created and in a word they are gorgeous. Seriously. If you need a new door or believe that you might want to have a custom made door in the future do take the time to visit the site and bookmark it. I think you’ll be as pleased with the selection as I was!

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