It feels kind of blasphemous calling it a “vacation” considering I don’t really earn any serious money at the moment, but on one hand, when I’m writing, I do end up working well over 12 hours each day, so I live for these scheduled breaks.
There’s a lot of stuff that needs to get done around the house. Just to recap: a few years ago, a couple of fool twenty-something-year-olds got it into their heads that they could build a house with limited knowledge and even more limited funds. It felt kind of silly going up to a builder’s and saying, “Hey, we want to build a house,” and then having to say it a couple more times (a little louder each time) so that they don’t ignore us (which a couple of guys did), because the housing market in the Greater Vancouver area is perhaps the craziest in North America and we weren’t exactly retirees or rich kids…not by a long shot. In fact, my husband was a teenage runaway at 17, and we got married at 20, and life was pretty much shit from the beginning…
But I won’t bore you with the details. Suffice to say, we were–due to being boring people with absolutely no interesting hobbies outside of beer-making and writing and cooking–able to save up a good chunk of money, and put in a bit on the land where we’ve been living on in a trailer the past five years before that. So we were able to envision building a house using brutal math. By brutal math, I meant that I designed the house strictly around a budget, and strictly with shit like, “We can paint it ourselves…” and “$2000 for molding? LOLz how about zero?!” and “Who needs furniture…” I think the builders thought we were crazy when we giggled over shit like that. In all honesty, we probably were.
We ended up being the general contractors for the later half of the build to save money and it was a pain in the ass. At one point, during home inspections, we had to get a lawyer on board, and it ended up costing way, way more than I thought it would. And the craziness just went on. Working long hours and then coming straight to the construction site to do all the things we couldn’t afford didn’t want to pay people for, like shovel gravel, waterproof the bathrooms (Google is your friend), and did I mention we had a 2-year-old and a 5-year-old and were living in the closet-sized basement of my parents’ townhome with the dogs and oh God, just thinking about those days makes me want to throw up and/or stab myself in the eyeballs…
We managed to get an occupational permit and the rest, as they say, is history. Kind of. There’s still stuff like the kitchen backsplash to install (the material’s been sitting in our dining room for two years), and we’re welcoming our nephew to Canada this January, so we need to get that third bathroom in the basement done somehow. And I think we haven’t sealed the grout?! Everywhere? And one of the doors is missing trim for some reason. And…ugh, now I’m getting dizzy again…
Anyway, here’s some pictures from those crazy years just to give me the kick in the ass I need to get what I can done over the next few weeks.
