My husband and I retired, became (sort-of) empty nesters, and downsized our home last year. |I can’t say that we downsized too too much, but we certainly took the opportunity to purge prior to our move. That’s not to say that we don’t need to keep at it. We still have the stuff of all of our young adult children, along with our own.

When we decided to sell, we wanted to move to an in town location, where we could get to know the neighbours a little bit, walk to a coffee shop and other amenities. We didn’t however need to be close to any big cities for work, so we were able to take advantage of property values by moving to a new city. The key for us was to be near transportation hubs for our kids to visit us, (Airport, train and highway), and to commute to their summer jobs. We think we did a good job of that, but we’d sure like them to visit more!

So being retired, we needed some purpose. Some hobbies. A project or two. As you know, the blogging is coming along, I’ve been gardening a lot, and my husband has a new fishing boat, so we’ve been visiting the great outdoors. Winter is coming though, so we have turned our attention to the great indoors. Our century home.

We chose a home that we could improve a little bit at a time (that is HOPEFULLY no big expensive projects!), doing things mostly within our abilities. AND our abilities are not extensive, but we are always willing to learn. OH, and the main thing – I wanted a really old home that was pretty.

We have started on one of the upstairs bedrooms. We first had a roofer visit and try to caulk around our chimney, which may be leaking – creating a nasty sticky brownish stain on the inside wall. Let’s hope this problem is solved – but I have the feeling this may be an ongoing problem – perhaps a new chimney?

Then we peeled the 1990s wallpaper. It was actually nice, but it was torn, and stained, so it had to go. We tried scraping with special wallpaper remover spray, and a wallpaper scraping tool, but the best tools we could use were our own hands, a metal spatula and warm water in a spray bottle. And days and days. It was a messy job, but it’s done. There was a lot of hole filling. Then we painted a light blue grey – which looks like baby blue. So we will give it another coat. Then we tore up the 1990s brown rug. Underneath there was 1/4 inch of plywood with nails everywhere. I thought there might be old pine flooring underneath – my husband thought it must be something that needed replacing.

After another 2 full days of pulling up nails and eventually the plywood, we were happy to find a full – ready to refinish pine floor. I am so excited to refinish it. That will have to wait another day. Tomorrow we will take the plywood to the landfill and get ready for refinishing. My husband is so sore from removing all of those nails!

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