Shed Wars 2: The Sheddening

Shed Wars did not end when Christine and I pushed against the back of that monstrosity last year and caused it to collapse. Oh no. That was just part one.

We are now converting the bunkie into a shed / boat house. The notion of having a little mini-house in which people can sleep is nice, but impractical. We have a guest bedroom, the Sun Room and even a sofa bed in the living room where people can sleep and each is significantly closer to the bathroom and, perhaps more importantly, the Keurig.

Also, at some point we had a critter infestation in the bunkie. There was a staggering amount of mouse poops throughout the little building. It reached a point where I've given up on having chocolate sprinkles on ice cream going forward. We couldn't possibly ask someone to spend a night in there any longer.

So here's a touch of what I was facing.

This is after taking out the fire bowl and the lawn chairs. The place was crazy cluttered.

The priority was getting rid of the mattress and box spring in the back. We have a work bench in the garage that we want to bring down and place in that spot. Christine rented a U-Haul van on Monday and not only did we manage to get that done, but we tossed out parts of the original shed that were still laying around.

The carpet has been pulled up and...it isn't so bad under there. The plywood floor is solid, aside from one rotted corner, and there's a patch of mould to deal with. Frankly, we expected far worse.

That was a lot of work, even though I had a bit of help...

Know why George was so interested? When I moved the mattress out, a mouse popped out of the middle and scared the hell out of me. So of course I screamed like a little girl. I had no idea there might still have been a beast in there.

But George knew! He was all over it.  And that's the cushion to one of the lawn chairs above. When he got a hold of that, he was on a mission.

So that done, I hit the "off duty" switch.  Bugsy helped there too.

Settle down, Ladybug!
Good girl. 

After our visit to the dump (Gary was there!), returning the U-Haul and determined to take it easy from there on in, Christine made a pot of that Canadian Tundra stuff I posted earlier. Damn, that stuff is good...

We spent a nice, relaxing afternoon and evening. Which was good, because we woke up to this:

Huh...what?

We were there from Saturday to Tuesday. The temperature would drop to slightly below zero overnight and reach about 10 during the day. Christine had heard that snow was possible, but two inches was a bit unexpected nonetheless.

I loved it. I've long wanted to spend a relatively warm winter day at the cottage but we always held off because normally the water hose would be pulled.

Well, I got one. In April, granted, but I got one. A morning, anyway. By the time we left in mid-afternoon, most of it was gone.

More Floor Futures

I still don't want to show anyone what's going on in the dining room and the hallway but I can say that it's well underway.

My dad and I planned on heading out there last Saturday to work on a number of things. There was no way we would be bored, there are plenty of projects, big and small, to attack. Asley made a surprise guest-appearance and provided another extremely helpful pair of hands.

Once we got going, there was no stopping our little runaway freight train. We worked for five or six hours straight. Well...I did take the occasional break to text Christine about how friggin' awesome the whole thing looked.

We made sure the floor was level. Or as level as we were ever going to get it, anyway. We're not exactly working with a quality canvas here. If the walls are crooked, the floors are too, right?

But despite that little road block we got about 80% of the dining room done. Dad and I are heading back out there tomorrow to wrap it up. In theory. I shall report back.

At some point, feeling I wasn't contributing much (it doesn't take three people to tap in uncut boards of vinyl flooring) I wandered off to finish the stairs.

Man, look at that...Why in the hell would you ever tile that over? It's unlikely that we will. We'll give them a good sanding and proper framing but this is a case of less is more.

Here's another look at the post "demolition" result.

Maybe a stain or something...We'll figure it out.

Of course, now we're falling into the trap of "The floor will look great in the hallway!" leading to "The stairs will look like crap."  Then when the stairs look great, the floor around the fireplace in the living room will look like a turd in a punch bowl. And so on and so forth.

So while I don't like to overstate things, I must admit that we're at the point where the mere sight of that living room floor tile feels like a violation of our souls.

Thankfully we believe we've landed on its replacement.  If you can find the time, rotate your eyes about five degrees to your right.

See that colour scheme? That's going to be the floor down there, we think. It should blend nicely with the other half of the room.

Not sure yet of the timing on this one. I mean, I would LOVE for it to be done for when Christine's mum next visits but I'm not sure about scheduling, resources (including manpower), etc.

We do have a few days off at the end of April....