Hey Everyone!

Big updates this week:

• We have a bathroom window!
• We painted every nook and cranny white!
• Kitchen cabinets went in!
• Hardwood has been installed!
• We moved in!!!!

We are happy to report that we are moved into a semi-renovated home!!! While we need to keep working, we want to give everyone a quick update on what’s happened the last few weeks and how we accomplished so much. If you’re just reading this for the first time, this is the journey of us buying a tiny home in Canada that was built after the war in 1946 and transforming it into a minimalistic, Scandinavian retreat!

Ok, so, in total, we have put 200 hours into the house, for probably a combined 350 between Erik and the electrician!  Each night after work, we would be assigned tasks by Erik that had to be done by the next morning.  These “taskings” helped us stay on schedule – mentally it made it so much easier to set a goal for the night and NOT STOP until it was done. The day we moved we ended up tiling our bathroom til midnight!  We truly think our strong willpower and only giving in to extreme exhaustion were key to getting it done.  In between we were trying to pick finishes and run to Home Depot for materials needed for the next day or week.

Advice

We have tons of advice for anyone undergoing renovations – PLAN PLAN PLAN. And when you think you’ve thought of everything – PLAN SOME MORE! We’ve had fun, but it’s tough making decisions when you’re under the gun. Oh, and anything nice takes 3-4 weeks for delivery. Take it from us. We were in a tough place not having possession of the house before hand so we had to make decisions on the fly, but if you have the time and measurements in advance- use ’em!

Here’s a quick run down of our update, because we have a LOT more to do:

Bathroom

Check out our new bathroom window! Doesn’t look like much now, but you won’t believe the before and after.

Hardwood

There was a bit of a scare with the hardwood floors. Upon delivery, we eagerly grabbed the DARKEST piece of wood to gingerly inspect from the box! Expecting light blonde floors with grey, the piece we grabbed was very very brown.

But good news! Once installed, we loved them. Phew! It was just a fluke that the few pieces we looked at were the darkest in the whole lot.

Kitchen

Onto the kitchen! Erik did an amazing job of installing all the cabinets we put together.  Kaara was freaking out the night before when we brought all the cabinets upstairs that it was going to look small and closed in, but it actually looks SO open and amazing now! Special shout out to our friend Marie-France for keeping us sane throughout the last of the kitchen cabinets and standing that tall bad boy up without wrecking the ceiling.

We will have a whole post on advice for those of you thinking of installing an Ikea kitchen. We learned a lot. We’ll leave it at that for now, and our friends and family can rest assured that while we discussed cutting our losses and breaking up while building those *&%^##@ing cabinets, we’re happily still a couple.

Lastly, the rest of the behind the scenes stuff included repairing the siding on the outside of the house from the window installation, sealing tiles and TONS AND TONS of painting. We painted the crown, the walls, the ceilings, new window trim that Stace and Erik made, the baseboards. The list goes on. We painted everything in Benjamin Moore, Regal (brand), Chantilly Lace (colour). Luckily, white paint is a dream and we did it all before the hardwood went in – so that flew. Excellent tip from our contractor, Erik. If you’re re-doing the floors, and painting – PAINT FIRST!!! We tried a few different whites and think we could write a whole blog post on that too – happy to report that Chantilly Lace is a pure white and isn’t pulling any yellow or blues hues it seems!

Another post coming soon – we promise! Thanks for following our journey as we renovate this tiny Canadian home into a Scandinavian retreat!

Love and light from our sunny new den!

Kaara & Stace