What a difference a year makes…
We're blogging from Barbados today as we're on vacation celebrating Tash's grandmother's 90th birthday. The other night we decided to pop by one of our favorite spots on the island for an impromptu dessert. Tapas Restaurant is a great little place that you can sit right on the water's edge and enjoy the fantastic food and ambiance.
The Race Against the Elements!
You may have noticed that we've been a little quiet on the house front for the last couple of weeks. Well, you're right. We have, and the main reason: WINTER. Now on a normal year, we aren't winter's biggest fans, but this year we're especially bitter as the sudden influx of full blown arctic weather has essentially thrown our construction schedule to the wolves!
Design Week: The Dreamhouse Revealed
Well Design Week is coming to a close. In case you missed it be sure to check out the rest of this week's posts. We first took you through our search for inspiration, then outlined how we focused in on our full wish list and created our look book. Today we're finally revealing The Dreamhouse on paper as we go through Kevin's design and it's evolution from rough sketch to colour rendering.
Design Week: The Look Book
Once we got through the initial research, we took a more in-depth look at the photos we had compiled. What we figured out is that overall we love modern contemporary architecture and we want our house to reflect that in its design both inside and out. That said, we'd still like to maintain a bit of neighbourhood charm because let's be honest, we're not trying to create an art installation in the middle of the suburbs!
Design Week: The Inspiration
Today we're kicking off Design Week - or probably what will become the first of several recurring 'design weeks' as a project like ours just has so many different phases of the design process. This week we'll be focusing on the architectural design.
Team Dreamhouse: Introducing KW Design
We've been mentioning Kevin and KW Design a lot on the blog lately and you must be wondering - '"who is this Kevin we keep hearing so much about??" Well we thought it was about time we made some formal introductions.
Playing Musical Blocks…
Who would have figured that building a house would be so drama filled! So the latest chapter to our story is about blocks. Yes those very same cinder blocks used to build the foundation. The story is a little complicated but we'll will start at the beginning and try to make it as simple as possible...
Mail Status: Undeliverable
Canada Post said we can't have our mail. :-(
Ok, wait...that sounds crazy. I guess I should explain. So back in December, I lost my purse at the Buffalo Bills game in Toronto. Thankfully a kind citizen found it emptied my wallet of the cash, and turned it in to security. So I did get it back the next day, but not before cancelling my credit card.
Forms, Footings, Foundations and Frustrations!
So the house is gone... What happened next? Well after tearing down the existing house we brought in a crew to build the forms for the footings that support the foundation walls. This step was originally planned for mid-late November when the weather was a lot better, but because of the permit delays we were a bit behind schedule and the crew we had originally lined up was no longer available.
Pouring a little concrete [Video]
Things are finally underway! Now that the site is prepped, the actual construction can begin. We happened to stop by the site just in time to catch the boys pouring the concrete for the footings that will support the foundation of our house.