A Christmas Tree Hunting We Will GO!

sorry for the delay in posts everyone - since moving into our house on November 30th it's been a little crazy.  There are still about 15 - 20 boxes that have not been emptied including an entire extend-a-bag suitcase full of my clothes!!! 

We are still trying to decide where everything is going to live in this fantastic house of ours.  The one downfall of course is I gave up a GORGEOUS kitchen to this hum drum 1981 kitchen and there just isn't enough space for ANYTHING!

For example cereal boxes only fit in two places, above the fridge (where I can't reach) or above the stove.  Well since above the stove is the only "tall" shelf space I can access, there are many things that live up there right now, which is annoying - there is no real flow to our kitchen and hence the 6 boxes in the corner that are not unpacked yet.

Even though the kitchen sucks, there are some HUGE pluses to this house compared to our little house in Elora.  Our whole house is living space! In Elora, our basement was only for storage and laundry - you couldn't scrapbook down there or watch TV or read a book. But here you can do any of the aforementioned tasks in any room in this house, which is super cool.

I promise to post pictures of our great house in East Hill once we have everything set up and painted.

and now to talk about the title of this blog! So on the weekend Sean and I went with the family to cut down our Christmas tree.  

Now in Ontario this means you drive to the "country" and visit a Christmas tree farm.  You walk out in to the forest, find a tree, cut it down and then pay the nice man on your way out.  

Well out here in British Colombia (Canada's logging capital) you just drive up a logging road on a mountain, walk out in to the forest, find your tree, cut it down, put it on the top of your car and drive away - there is no many to pay.  

Now technically, this is illegal - but I won't tell if you don't.

here are some pictures (courtesy of my very talent hubby) of our adventures up the logging road!

Cousin Matt found his tree in 2 minutes

Cedar in her cool Russian hat

Family Portrait - Michelle, Pierre, Cedar and Brodie

Us with our tree!

The Tree Line Up - I believe ours is about an inch taller than Pierre's

Brodie -  Come

 

 

 

 

 

All of our Trees on top of the Outback

Ta Ta for Now

xoxo Bri

We bought a house!

just a quick update to let you all know that Sean and I signed the 4 pages last night and bought ourselves a house!

here are the pictures from the MLS listing

Our 12x16 deck (missing a railing) so we'll be adding that in the summer

our backyard, needs a little work

laundry room

downstairs full bathroom

rec room in basement

rec room in the basement

second bedroom - upstairs

3rd bedroom, downstairs (possibly the craft room)

living room upstairs with a wood burning fireplace - pretty isn't it?

Dining room with doors outside to our deck

main level full bathroom

master bedroom

Kitchen - not as nice as the one I gave up but one day it will be

Living Room

We get possession of our house on Tuesday, November 29th!! so just under 2 weeks until we move out of the condo and into our house - very exciting!

Ta Ta For Now
Brianne

Dreaming of a New Craft Space

it's 7:12pm and I am patiently waiting for my hubby to make it home so we can go eat supper.  As I am patiently waiting I am dreaming of what our new house will look like once we move in.....

We got some great news today, the beautiful little house on the hill that backs on to a cemetery is one step closer to being ours.  Our broker came through and got us a signed deal with Scotiabank!
The last step is for our home inspection report to show us nothing major and then we will sign on the dotted line and move in on November 30th.

What I can't wait for the most is to move into my NEW scrapbooking room.  This beauty of a house comes with 3 bedrooms, so this time we will actually have a spare bedroom with a bed (courtesy of Stacy) for all your visitors and a separate scrapbooking space.

I've been researching what I want this space to look like, and here are some of the fabulous options I've found, courtesy of houzz.com.

 

 

I love the space for friends to come and crop

love the punch of colour and kick ass wall paper - what a place to create in

I like having the desk in the middle with a great light right above your workspace

I love how cozy and organized chaos this room is

this punch of colour is awesome

Each picture has something in it that I want to capture in my space.

• bright punch of colour 
• tons of storage
• a great workspace
• handy ways of storing items

Of course the biggest thing for me is STORAGE! my new mantra is "a place for everything and everything in it's place".  The hard part is paying for the storage! Scrapbooking companies are smart, they know you want 12x12 sized items so these come with a pretty price tag.  My mission is to reuse some materials to make my own storage.

give me your thoughts - what do you like about the above pics?
For the croppers out there - what in your craft space do you love the most???

Ta Ta For Now
Bri

A House Hunting We Will Go

...well as promised here is the update on our hunt for a house in Vernon.

In true Brianne fashion I was totally prepared to view houses the day after we arrived in Vernon.  My fantastic friend Sara Knol hooked me up with her friend and relator Saffron Quist and for two weeks while we were still in Ontario I bombarded Saffron with questions and MLS listings - in fact I sent her 22 houses I wanted to view!!! 

In the end, I narrowed the list down to 7 and Saffron set up the appointments!

So off we went, it was a beautiful BC day, sun was shining and I was PUMPED to start finding our new abode here.  The disappointment started early.  The house I love love love already had an offer on it.

my #1 choice but was sold before we got here

and the #2 house was pulled off the market.  So now with our list of houses down to 5 I turned to Saffron to fill in the blanks with some of her personal choices.

We saw a ghetto house with a cement front yard in a not so desirable area, a beautiful lot with a creek running through it, but Grandma died in the house, and then we saw the foreclosure house.  

The Foreclosure House

Now this house is HUGE and up in the hills with a view to die for, so of course Sean and I were game to see it.  We get there and everything is great until we get to the basement - where spray painted in lime green there are pictures of men's privates, F-bombs on the walls and lots of the female dogs!  

Sean liked the potential of the house, but I didn't want to be in a house with so much negativity!

Next we get to a house that Saffron recommended - I had seen it on MLS but I wasn't too keen on only having 2 bedrooms. 

 

Well the moment you walk into this house your jaw drops, it is GORGEOUS!! Granite counter tops, huge stone fireplace, bathrooms to die for - well it did not take long for Sean and I to see ourselves settling down in this beautiful home - oh and did I mention it comes with a hot tub and a full workshop?? So that was it, we went for lunch and decided to put on offer on this beauty.

It wasn't until the home inspection that our dreams were crushed! for lack of better words, this house had an indoor pool in the basement, and not the kind you want.  The foundation has been leaking for at least 25 years so let's just say there is a lot of water.....too much water for us to take on, so just as quickly as we were dreaming of hot tubbing in the snow, we had to cancel our bid on the house.

To say my dreams were crushed was an understatement - for the next 2 days we looked at some more houses and even went back to our runner up and all of them just paled in comparison.

It took me taking a day off from house hunting and switching up "shopping" partners for me to get back into the groove of finding a house and low and behold we found 2!
and here she is!

We've agreed on a price and now we are just waiting to hear from our mortgage broker to make sure they will give us the moola to buy this great house! oh and of course on the house inspection :)

of course I'll keep you updated on what happens!

ta ta for now!

Brianne