Laura Jones on the run

Yep, I’m officially a fugitive. I committed my first ever punishable offence on Monday night. B&E. I’m a hardened criminal. Though, I do wonder if it is considered B&E when it is your own house you are breaking into?

Jenny is currently residing in Woodstock while we finish packing up our apartment and moving this week. We took her to Woodstock last week since we didn’t want to leave her by herself from Tuesday to Sunday (particularly after just having left her from Thursday – Sunday. Jenny hates car rides, and proved her hatred for it about 2/3rd of the way there when she (while I was holding her) projectile vomited all over the console and Arash who was driving. Nice. So needless to say she stayed in Woodstock this week so that we wouldn’t subject her (or us?) to the trauma of two more car rides.

So Monday night comes around, and I stop in at home to feed Jenny and to put another coat of paint on the stairs. But wait, the “second set” set of keys, you know the ones that we haven’t tried yet. The ones I have with me? They don’t work. Oops. So yes, I had to break into my own house. Luckily over the weekend I noticed that the latch in one of the bedrooms was broken so I piled up paint buckets under the window, slid it open and pulled myself into the room. Standing on three paint pails that came up to my waist put me so that the start of the window was boob height, so it took a bit of muscle power to get myself in, and for a moment I didn’t think I could do it and that I would fall to the ground with disastrous results. Thankfully though I made it. And now have the bruises all over my arms to prove it. I’m in a bit of pain here.

When I got back to KW, I had time to pick up my ring. Yay! I feel like I am officially engaged now since I have the ring to prove it :)

Yesterday I was sick. It sucked. Woke up with a wonky tummy and a bad headache. Headache is gone, but tummy is still not perfect. Kind of coming and going in ebbs and tides.

So that is it for me. Please, no one disclose my location to the police ;)

A Very Busy Weekend

Or, actually, 4 days.

On Thursday we spent the day running around with our heads cut off… well, not really, but that is certainly how it felt. A. had his drivers test at 8:55 am in Woodstock, after that we had to pick up the rental cargo van to pick up stuff that we would need. Alas, there are some tasks that a Toyota Camry is not built for ;) We had to go to storage, pick up the futon, go to sears buy a bbq and lawnmower, go back to the apartment to pick up stuff we would need and get Jenny ready for 4 days on her own (the longest we have left he for! She was pretty needy last night and this morning), to home depot to pick up painting suppliest ($1000 worth of paint and accessories! Ack! The dude told us way too much paint though, and it looks like we pretty much got twice as much as we needed. Grrr. Hopefully we can return some of the white paint (ceiling paint, semi-gloss and primer). Finally we went to best buy to buy our new tv (32” Panasonic LCD TV – regularly $1500! But it was on sale, we got it for the discount price of $1200 .)

By the time we finally got back to the house and unloaded it was 6 pm, and we needed to get the floor cleared of carpets since the guy who was coming to refinish the floors was supposed to be there Thursday evening. We started removing the carpet and the floor was looking pretty fantastic. Until we got to the stairs. There was a dark dark stain at the bottom of the stairs and it looked bad. By this time it was 9 pm and no flooring guy, so I decided to give him a call. Apparently something came up and he couldn’t come. Thanks for the call asshole. Seriously, why would you not call? I described the stain to him, he though he wouldn’t be able to get it out and that the floor would have to be patched there. Great. So we continue along with our carpet removal and hit “The stairs of staples”. We have a side split, so there are only 6 stairs between the main floor and the upstairs. Sounds simple enough right? Well, on those six stairs their must have been somewhere between 1000 and 2000 staples. I’m not exaggerating here either. They were the little tiny ones that are just wide enough to fit a pair of needle nose plyers through (if there is enough clearance, and got about 1 cm into the wood. They take an incredible amount of effort to pull out, provided that they actually come out and don’t break in the process. I started working on the stairs at 9 pm on Thursday and finished pulling staples out of the six stairs by 2:30 on Friday. Seriously. We think the dude that put the carpet in got a new nail gun and went a little gung ho. The wood was pretty beat up from that little escapade. Another part of our floors that couldn’t be refinished. While I was busy going insane, A. got the carpet off of the other rooms and ripped up the subflooring. The room that will be the office has rotten wood that is buckling. Great. Hallway same deal, rotting wood, but the guest bedroom was the saving grace. The floor looks FANTASTIC in there and won’t even need to be refinished. It looked amazing. I was very happy about that.

So off to home depot we go to sort out our flooring woes. We ended up deciding to put in Laminate in the office and upstairs hallway and hardwood in the living room. We are still trying to sort out the stairs. Right now we have filled in all the little staple holes with plaster and have painted the sides white. We were planning on painting the sides white and laminated the steps, but now we are leaning towards painting the whole stairs white and perhaps running a nice rug down the middle to keep them a little cleaner. When we finally got back to the house, I continued to remove the staples from upstairs (just the subflooring staples, MUCH easier to pull out, but there were still a lot of them) while A put the BBQ together so that we could have some dinner.

When the BBQ was all put together and A. was going to start cooking dinner, he called me outside to come and join him. And, as some of you know now, he proposed. Apparently, this isn’t how he had planned it. We got a mulberry tree to plant at the house (the tree of love ;)) and he was going to propose while we were planting it, but the tree kind of got pushed aside in favour of other stuff this weekend so he asked while cooking dinner on our new bbq. The tree did eventually get planted but it wasn’t until dusk last night. The engagement ring was my mums, which made me cry. I always loved my mum’s ring, and I am so happy that it is now mine. It is more valuable to me than all the diamonds in the world. It is white gold with an oval star sapphire. I can’t wear it yet because my mum had ginormous fingers. Like the ring is at least a size 10. I believe my ring finger is an 8 or 8.5. The ring is currently too big for my thumb. No details yet on when the nuptials will take place, we aren’t going to start worrying about the details until after the house is finished.

This is the post that does not end, yes it goes on and on my friends…

Saturday we got the rooms ready for paint. A’s mum came from TO to help out. We primed all the trim (ugly wood coloured) and before we left on Sunday we got 3 coats of semi gloss on. I’m thinking I want to do one more coat, but this will likely wait for a while now. Ceilings in the upstairs hall and office got painted and the walls in the living room, hall (asparagus green – the colour of my green v-neck sweater for those that know it), and office (sky blue) got their first coat of paint. I’m happy with how it is starting to look. I think that when we are done it is going to look great and very us. Before the house looked old and dull, now at least half of it will be hip and modern (we are leaving the basement for now). We are a far cry from where we wanted to be at this point, but hopefully it will all come together. A is taking Wednesday to Friday off this week. I’m taking Friday off so we will be in Woodstock starting tomorrow night. This time Jenny is coming with us. Hopefully we can get a second coat onto the walls before Arash starts putting in the floors on Thursday. Should be possible now with him taking another day off work. Otherwise it would have been a sleepless night on Wednesday which would not have made for a fun day on Thursday for me. We are kind of in full damage mode now and plan to only get done the essential things before we move. Hopefully everything goes well and we get most of the important stuff done first!

Countdown Homeowner... 22 hours, 9 minutes

So. This is it. One day from now, I will be a proud joint owner of a 1960s side split in the booming metropolis of Woodstock, Ontario. It has been a stressful week. I, like blythe, made the mistake of waiting to the last minute to transfer money into my chequing account. I called last Thursday thinking I had plenty of time, but neglected to account for the fact that it would have to do two bank transfers – one from Manulife to CIBC (my investment banker is CIBC Wood Gundy) and one from CIBC to my chequing account at Scotia. My CIBC account isn’t a regular account that I could go to any branch and get a bank draft. Anywho, CIBC apparently got the money on Friday but forgot to send it on and it takes 48 hours between CIBC and Scotia. Aka, Laura is screwed, but I talked to them first thing yesterday morning and the money was still sitting there, so they prepared a bank draft and walked it over to the scotia branch in downtown Belleville and deposited directly into my account – Crisis averted thank god.

I am very preoccupied at work today, and am not being very productive. I keep getting excited/stressed about our house and impending home ownership. On top of that my IBS appears to be acting up today so my lower digestive tract is giving me grief. I may go home sick early today because I’m in quite a bit of pain right now. And from past experience it is just going to get worse. I’m sticking it out to lunch since I have to go to the bank, but if it doesn’t get better, I may leave early this afternoon.