Inside trim started

Finally, we have the finished flooring everywhere in the house except for the guest room (aka the junk collecting room, as everything that's needed but just "not right now", is thrown unceremoniously in there). The laminate looks great and feels so nice on your feet after months of walking on the strand board!


Our ensuite bathroom upstairs is almost complete now too. James from Century Glass installed the wall and door in the shower itself last week and Leo from ST Granite and Marble installed the top on the vanity on Saturday morning. We were lucky as less than two hours after Leo left, the skies opened up and we received yet another soaking from Mother Nature. She seems determined to keep the forest fires under control this year! Last weekend we picked up the lights we had chosen for the vanity and toilet and I managed to get them all in and working. These LED bulbs we use are amazing. Consuming only 4 watts each, they produce 200 lumens of light energy. The 9 bulbs that we have in this bathroom use only 36 watts of power and light the area perfectly. We get these particular ones at Costco for less than $10 per bulb which is a steal for the LED technology and we should never have to replace any of them (they carry a 25,000 hour guarantee!) If you do the math, that works out to more than 3 years of continuous 24/7/365 service!
The walk-in closet upstairs now has lots of hanging space, shelves and drawers available so we can finally stop living out boxes and plastic tubs. Yay! It's funny how this closet seems to be quite large now, whereas when it was empty it looked too small to fit even half our stuff. This is a phenomenon we have experienced throughout the entire build. Spaces expand and contract in your mind all the time depending of the state of completion. Scary at times but interesting nonetheless.
We had also picked up some baseboard trim last weekend, painted it white and have started to install some of it. The upstairs closet and the laundry room are now done with other rooms soon to follow. A few more doors, all the window trim and casings, and the place will start to look darn near like a house! Then if it ever stops raining we can do the siding and trim outside! The work just never seems to end!
Clayton brought up the deck railings on Monday with installing them in mind. However, an incorrectly made post with the angles all wrong for the front - centre of the deck kiboshed that plan. A new piece is being made up and they promise to have it all on before the long weekend (this weekend). The railings look very nice, being the smallest size tubes and railings that we could get and we can't wait to see them up.
I don't have the camera with me today, but I will post up some pics tonight of all the progress.
One other thing I'll bring up here is the flooding. If you've been reading the papers lately, you couldn't help but notice that all this rain we've been getting is wreaking havoc with the rising rivers. Many road closures and evacuations have been the norm lately and many homes on the floodplains are hoping that the rivers crest and start to subside before any more damage is done. In Kamloops, our Riverfront Park walkway is underwater and the beach is non-existant, hidden under many feet of the flooding North Thompson River. We took a couple of photos last week and the rivers have risen several feet since then!

A Brown Bear (this time!)

We have been busy installing the flooring throughout the house. Well, okay, I've been busy! Carol has been slacking off enjoying the nice warm weather in southern Ontario while she visits friends and family. We were hoping that the vanity top and the shower door and glass wall would be in before she got back but that hasn't happened. Just as well because we've had so much rain in the last little while that our driveway has been a soggy mess much of the time. I doubt that anything without 4 wheel drive would have been able to get up here some days!

 Of course, I managed to injure my calf muscle a couple of weeks ago trying to service my motorcycle (I was straining to lift it onto the centre stand!) and that put a crimp on my walking around, let alone installing floor boards for almost a week. I am feeling much better now though and have managed to get almost all of the main floor done. It's looking good but I will save posting any images of it until it is finished! For now, enjoy some recent pics. The brown bear (a brown coloured Black Bear) showed up yesterday in the middle of the afternoon! I guess he was out enjoying one of the few really nice sunny days we've had this spring. The shot of the steamy driveway was taken in the early morning after 4 days of rain. The owl is a Great Gray Owl, one of a pair that we often see hunting around the house. They like to sit on the top of the fence posts waiting for a mouse to run by. They are quite successful as we've seen several occasions where they swoop down and catch one, and then eat it in one gulp!