What I’ve Been Busy With… #Adulting

So aside from being busy with jtooned.co and other regular life things, the past 10.5 months, our lives have really just revolved around our new place. If you scroll back enough, you might remember that we sold our first house back in August on 2020. Since then, we’ve gone to multiple design appointments to put the house together – which is really the most exciting part of it all other than physically moving into it afterwards.

Our original possession date was supposed to be April 30th but due to COVID, many of the restrictions pushed our date to July 7th. Many of the trades had to take turns going into the house rather than just all going in at once to get things done. A bit frustrating to say the least, but it is what it is. Fast forward, and we’ve been busy just trying to get the house put together. You’d think that there isn’t much to do when moving into a new place but you would be very mistaken. Things like getting new furniture, decorations, creating appointments for things like getting internet installed, air conditioning, security, etc. Other things like having to put up TV’s and building old furniture… It’s just a lot of little things piled up that take up a lot of time.

Outside of those things, I’ve really been itching to get the garage done. I really can’t stand an unfinished garage and hate the look of drywall and mudding all over the place. Over the last week, I’ve been working here and there trying to get the mudding and sanding all done prior to this weekend for paint. Mudding and sanding is probably the worst part of getting a garage ready to go – it’s messy, tiring, and there’s very little gratification that comes from it, so it can be hard to stay motivated LOL.

Here’s a shot of me about 90% done the mudding and sanding. I had a few more spots on the ceiling but that was it. Part of me was hating myself for not just paying the builder to finish it off completely but the cost was roughly $7000 to do a full two-coat mud/sand and finish with paint. Even now when I think about it, that’s way too much money (for me) and I’d rather spend the time to do it myself and spend a little under $1000 in materials and supplies, despite how much I end up swearing and hating myself for it.

One of the things I did with the garage was slope the ceilings upward to get to 13ft ceilings. I really wanted to get high ceilings to give me more room to play with. Unfortunately, reaching those 13ft ceilings was not so fun. Diana’s brother, Victor, has been a huge help in getting the garage done. Luckily he has access to a scaffold which is really the only way to reach the ceiling because my dinky ladders were not tall enough.

Victor is also pretty handy on the electrical side of things – something I don’t really dip my feet in – I’m just not comfortable with electrical stuff so thankfully he knows the ins and outs. Some of the other changes we’ve had to do is relocate two of the lights to fit the new overhead LED panels properly.

Here, he cut out the original light box and relocated it about 6″ so that we can fit the full lighting fixture after paint is done. The overhead lights are 1’x4′ and if we hadn’t moved it, the garage door frame would’ve blocked it.

Tomorrow, my Dad is coming and we’re gonna tackle the paint (finally) and hope to get it done this weekend. I’m excited to see it finally come together on that front.

After paint, the next thing that will be done is the Polyaspartic floor coating. Unfortunately, they’re extremely booked up so my appointment isn’t until September 17th – right in time for winter. That should be the finishing touch on the garage until I start getting to work on furnishing it afterwards. Stay tuned for update pics after the paint!

One other thing that I’ve been super excited about was getting solar panels installed on the house. I’m not going to rave about it here but I will say that it’s probably my favourite mod on the whole house – yes, even more than the garage. We were able to max out the roof with 31 panels. Above, you can see the size of the panel for comparison if you’ve never actually seen how big they are.