Home Sweet Home...for now.

Ahh, spring time in Paris! The cafes; the blossoms; the architecture...

No wait. Check that.

The calendar says Spring, but there's not much springing up and growing anew just yet, and this isn't Paris, it's Winnipeg, which once Spring starts happening is very wonderful and fresh as it removes its winter trappings and begins to green up and bloom, but it's not Paris.

And this ain't a love song.

This is the beginning of a story, a journey to find something new, of recreation and rebirth. It's been a number of years in the making (don't ask, it's been awhile, trust me) and its finally here; we're renovating the house.

Sure, we've done minor rehabs to the interior in the past, including the main floor bathroom (complete gut) and the basement including full bath down there too, and numerous coats of paint and new trim and roof, and seemingly endless variations of yardwork including 2 decks, 5 or 6 raised flower beds, the shed, and the fence. But this year we're tackling the kitchen.

And if you know us, you also know that its not going to be just a simple kitchen redo, with new cabinets and flooring and lights etc.

No, I've been blessed with a broken switch that allows things to grow, to blossom into much larger, more grander incarnations of their original plans. Like vacations, but that's another story...

It all started with an Island. Actually that's not true, it all started moments after we moved into this house, and made a list of the things we wanted to change about it, to make it our own. Like removing the green carpet on the main floor, and the pink and white shag carpet in the master bedroom, or the blue carpet in the back bedroom. Under all of which we found oak hardwoods. Or the pink bathroom fixtures upstairs, or the raised velvet on the black and red wallpaper in the rec-room that went so well with the dark wood panelling, and the black vinyl-upholstered front on the wet bar, which matched with the vinyl coverings on the support columns...

With all those areas fighting for priority, the kitchen got pushed down the list - though we knew we wanted to change it. And so we planned it out, while we worked on the other areas. And as life is known to do, plans change. Riley was born, certain areas of the renovations took greater immediacy than others, then vacations grew... and grew again, and again...well, you get the idea.

The time has come, the time is now.

And so, this year we've decided and embarked on the plan. Not the same plan for the kitchen that we first started with, mind you, or the second or third... And truthfully, if we had built any of those we'd be redoing the kitchen again, for those first plans wouldn't have solved the main issue we had with this house: that the main traffic flow to the basement went right through the too small kitchen.

Next time: some pictures of the old, and a look at how we got here.