It's a snowy day at the farmette. We got an inch over night, and it's still coming down. Arrgggh. I was out yesterday chopping down the "winter interest" aka dead plants in the beds and was looking forward to more slashing with secaturs and loppers today. Guess I'll just have to clean the house. Double arrggh.
Anyhow. Over the almost 10 years we've been here (how did that happen?), we've fixed up the 150+ year old farmette house quite a bit. Starting with our bedroom, the two bathrooms, the living room, my office and the sunroom (which was a bit a of a shit show but turned out nice). Now, it's finally time to give the old girl a bit of a facelift, and to tend to the smaller bits that need upgrading.
Last week, we contracted with Jeremy Clarke of Grey Bruce Landscaping to redo the front bed and re-surface the entire U-shaped driveway.
He's a lovely guy working out of Shallow Lake, which is about an hour north of us on the Bruce Peninsula. He came out and meticulously measured, asked good questions, gave great suggestions and provided us with a couple of hefty, but fair, estimates.
I've always wanted the two overgrown yews to come out, and finally, they're going to be replaced by five bunches of tall grass. Our one burning bush will be increased by two more, and we're going to have a Ukrainian colour scheme. Clumps of blue salvia and iris, yellow Stella D'oro lilies will be sprinkled around, accompanied by some of my hostas. I'll get a limelight hydrangea off to the west side, as a bonus. Can't wait. Jeremy has warned that he's not sure about plant availability (given the supply chain issues right now thanks to pandemic/war/pestilence, you name it) or prices, but we can figure that out as we go along.
We're also getting around to refurbishing the laundry room and the mudroom, which is the side entrance to the house.
As you can see, the laundry doubles as a litter room, so it gets "littered" frequently with five cats! Which is why we are getting good sturdy vinyl tile flooring to be installed over top of the linoleum that was probably installed in the seventies. It'll be a light grey. We're re-painting the walls white and replacing the light fixture, too.
The linoleum in the mudroom will be changed up, too. It'll be a nice marbled browny-beige to go with the softer yellow walls that we'll be painting ourselves. Wilma was gracious enough to pose for the camera this morning.
We've already ordered a new runner from Cuneo's, where we also ordered the tiling and installation. It's an independent flooring shop in Hanover that has been very good to us in previous renovations.
All of the work will start a few weeks in the future, given it's freaking still snowing, and the backlog on supplies and orders is quite extensive, again due to the pandemic/pestilence/war, etc. That's okay. We're patient and we're not going anywhere anyway.
Gotta say that it feels good to have things lined up, though. Until next week. Gratuitous cute cat photo below with Hobbes on the left and Calvin and Wilma cuddling beside him. Notice the distinct lack of room for human bums on the oversized chair.
