Fun!

I've been taking a few courses through a local photographer here in Ottawa, and having a lot of fun learning tonnes. He holds a contest every month to showcase one photograph, and this month I won:-) You can see my photo here. He compares it to an Ophelia photo, but I thought of it more as an extension of our love of mermaids........just very much beyond the Disney mermaid phase and moving into the darker mermaid stories:-)

A glimpse at our house coming together, part three

And here's a few shots of the south side of our house - where we're finishing up the roof. The second story was plastered over, including the areas around where the bottles were put in. Insulation is being laid out, dimple board drainage mat and soon we'll put a thin layer of soil and some plants up there - but perhaps that'll wait until next spring. Most of the cedar border is installed, and the house is looking more and more finished from the outside every day:-) The north side of the roof is steel, and it's all done as well - I'll try to snap a photo of that too:-)

Dominik

And a week after Kea's birthday, Jane and Art had their baby - a sweet baby boy named Dominik, who so far seems to be a pretty easy going guy! I'm fitting in as many cuddles as I possibly can, and snapping as many photos as I can. Who can resist such a cute face?!

Our baby girl turned eleven!!!!

It's been a few weeks since then, but here's a few photos of the beautiful birthday girl on the morning of her 'champagne birthday'! More than a decade, so hard to believe:-) And she continues to blossom into an amazing person, I really can't wait to see what the next decade brings in our adventures together!!!!

A glimpse at our house coming together, part two

I can't tell you just how much I LOVE LOVE LOVE our new plastered walls:-) I mean, yes, the fact that we have interior walls is very awesome, but I specifically love the fact that they are made with natural clay plaster. There's a beautiful texture to them that draws my eye, and I find whenever people first enter the house, one of the first things they do is touch the walls! There's also a fluidity to this style of wall, allowing it to form around trees and curves, adding a little character here and there!!!!!

Here's a shot down our hallway, from the front door -

And here's a shot of the corner in our front entrance, with a bit of the tree post poking through. It's very hard to do it justice with a camera, but I LOVE this corner:-)

And here's a shot of the actual wall, just to give you an idea of a bit of the texture - it's nothing dramatic, no big ridges everywhere, but enough to give it character. Some of the sand obviously had natural mica as well, so in some spots we get a lovely sparkle when the sun hits it right - fun!

And finally, one more shot of our walls, including the window in our study. Another part of the house that I am LOVING is the deep windowsills, the curves in the exterior walls, and the gorgeous window sills that Jamie created with salvaged, throw-away (!!!!!!) wood. I wish we would have picked up so much more, I'd love to use it for shelving all over the place. But I'm happy to at least be enjoying it in all of our windows!!!!

More to come, with time........we need one final blast of energy to get us through the final bits, but we are getting there!!!!!!!

A glimpse at our house coming together, part one

So here is a shot of our front entrance room, which is starting to come together - though we have to put together the shelving units and coat hooks still. BUT it is looking like a finished room now!




On the right hand side as you walk in, Jamie created this wood wall with scraps of wood leftover from our construction. I think it looks really good, especially as it butts into the plaster wall. We also wanted to showcase the lathe and plaster that we did, it looks so neat where all the plaster has 'keyed' into the lathe on the backside. So if you look in the photo above, you can see the two little windows of glass giving you a peak into the walls, and below I tried to take a photo into the window itself to give you an idea of what it looks like.



This is a shot of the wood coming into the plaster, and then on left wall, it is all plaster - with this right off the front door, our truth window!