Other Stuff

This week we're mixing things up a little bit because we've had an insanely busy week evenings-wise and so Philip hasn't had a chance to finish up his post for today. Therefore, we'll share the Saturday post and his post should be up tomorrow (but we'll give him grace if he's still not done). 

For those of you who haven't headed over to our blog on Saturday's, we've been sharing some links to articles and blog posts that we found interesting throughout the week. They range in topic from DIY/house-related, to recipes, to anything that we find interesting and think that our readers might also enjoy. So here goes!

This first link takes you to all the worlds we've grown to love, it shows blueprints for a lot of the apartments/houses of popular sitcoms. Want to see a blueprint of Ted Mosby's apartment? Lorelei & Rory's house? This is where you want to go!

At Making it Lovely this week, Nicole shared some accessories, media stands, etc. to pair together to make a beautiful TV centre. This piece from Target caught my eye because it was so interesting to be a Target item, and pretty reasonable! Target is supposed to be opening here soon, might have to go see if this is still around. I especially like it in Charcoal.

At Our Fifth House, Carmen transformed her dated fireplace into a conversation piece by painting it with chalkboard paint. I'm not sure if I'd be gutsy enough to do it myself, but it looks fantastic!

If meal planning still has you stumped - check out this super informative video where she walks through her weekly meal-planning method. I do something similar, but still have to hone my methods.

Philip has to wake up at 5:30 every day, and while I have a bit more flexibility over my sleep time, I often find myself waking up groggy, in the middle of a dream. This link has you enter the time you need to wake up and it tells you which times you should go to bed so that your sleep cycle won't be interrupted in the morning, leaving you groggy. 

Another Target find over at Mini Manor, but this article caught my eye more with her "One thing in, One thing out" philosophy. If you've read our blog before, you probably know I like to purge. It's so much easier to keep things clean and organized if you don't own a bunch of things you don't use. With Spring Cleaning in full swing, something to keep in mind! (Also if you live in Winnipeg and you're acquainted with us, we're planning for a garage sale this summer that will be open for anyone to join in with us - we don't have enough for a huge sale, so we were thinking we could all pool our resources - something to remember when you're going to purge this Spring!)

Of House Layouts and My Beautiful, Amazing, yet Measurement-Inept Wife

Welcome back to my weekly platform from which I share stories with 100% more Y-chromosome and dispense testosterone-enriched wisdom.

Today I am proud to unveil our house layout drawing, which has been a long time in the making. Of course, telling the story of its creation is not complete without highlighting one of my dear wife’s shortcomings.

Cass is a wonderful lady, my best friend, and has many amazing talents and gifts. She concocts great meals without the aid of a recipe book. She makes me laugh with her oft-absurd antics. She is bright and wise and has a strong sense of character.

But she can’t measure.

Can’t is a strong word, but she herself acknowledges it, and it is the correct word in this case. Give her a lemon, she’ll make lemonade. Give her a crying child, she’ll pacify it. Give her a measuring tape, and she’ll alter the fundamental structure of the space-time continuum by making 18 inches into 7 centimetres and getting three drastically different readings in four different units of measure (including “seconds”) for the width of the same window. I exaggerate only slightly.

Of course, a house is a difficult thing to measure. In theory, the width of one wall in a rectangular room should be the width of the opposite wall. In theory, the corners of a square room meet at 90° angles (no, honey, we don’t have to convert that to Celsius). But in practice, walls vary in thickness, floors and walls curve and bow (usually imperceptibly), and if you’re looking for a right angle you’d be better off turning on FOX News.

So when it came to putting together a layout for our house, for both you our readers and for us to draw and dream with, Cass let me take this project on (although she was a big help in holding the other end of the tape measure in a lot of cases). I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.

Our main floor layout at the time we moved in. (Spoiler alert: It hasn't changed much since then.)
As always, you can click the image to enlarge it.

The final product is off by, at most an inch and a half either way. In the picture you see here, I haven’t inserted where the cabinets are in the kitchen or where the built-in entryway shelving unit stands living on borrowed time, but this gives you an idea of what our main floor looked like when we moved in.

I designed it in Adobe Illustrator, which is more popular among graphic designers than interior decorators, but it’s the best option I had and it worked beautifully. Since then, I’ve found out there are a few free home design programs that probably could do a pretty good job too, if you don’t have a career that requires you to know industry standard design products (and perhaps I’ll test one of them sometime to see how well they work).

We’ve also posted this as part of our new Take the Tour page, a companion piece to the To-Do List. As we cross off items from the list, we’ll start to update the layout so you can see where we make our changes, moving walls, wiring lights, placing furniture and the like. Hours spent in fruitless meetings as part of my corporate existence has caused me to hate the term “living document,” but if that’s something that makes sense to you, that’s what we’re going for here.