Heading Out For A Cruise

The plan is to convince Miss Travelaire and the GPS lady to head us down south to Los Angeles (with some serious camping along the way), at which point they would park and wait for us while we embark on a seven day cruise. We are booked for Febuary 10th on the Ruby Princess to sail down along the coast of Mexico. Steve and Michelle and their kids are also going, but will fly down later. Now this is a big undertaking, and we hope it works out! The whole thing is scheduled a little bit earlier than we might have hoped, since we are not completely settled in our new home.

 

Speaking of our new home, we have some pictures of the stage it's now in. It's on a street named Meadowbrook Ridge. So we usually refer to home now as "Meadowbrook". We are situated on an 8 1/2 acre property (mostly fir trees) a little less than a km in from Prospect Lake just on the north side of Victoria.

Click on images to enlarge

 

This is our house, mostly finished, but with no landscaping yet. Eric & Sarah's place is the two story affair you see on the left, and there is a garage in between separating the two. The property is really convenient for Eric, who with his electrical business goes here and there up to Sidney, out to Sooke, down to Victoria, and every place in between.

 

This is Eric and Sarah's end. Eric and I milled all the timbers, posts and knee braces around the house out of logs from the property. The trim still needs painting, but that will have to wait until warm dry weather.

 

Our place is basically one big room. encompassing the living, dinning, and kitchen areas, plus a separate section for bedrooms. Here's a picture towards the living area, where the high vaulted ceiling really makes it seem very spacious. The fireplace enclosure still doesn't have its stone face installed yet, but the fireplace is fully functional. Air from around the firebox is directed in to the heating ducts, where the furnace fan circulates it throughout the house, including the bedrooms. Eric & Sarah's place has a similar fireplace, and they can heat the whole downstairs and upstairs in this way. We also have a heat pump, and electric furnace, but so far we've been heating almost exclusively with wood.

 

The wood that we've been burning for heating is from the slabs left over off the outside of the fir logs that we've sawn on our sawmill, shown here. We produced all the wide plank flooring for the main floor of both houses (about 2500 square feet) from these logs off our property.

 

Here is Eric last fall sanding one of the big beams for the entrance way of their house. My shop at our old place was humming with activity at that time and just packed full with flooring, posts, beams, and knee braces in various stages of finish.

 

Our kitchen shown here is really great. Eric had a former next door neighbour build the cabinets; although he is a little more expensive, he does a fantastic job, using real plywood rather than particle board. Eric managed to score a great deal on all the quartz counter tops for the kitchens laundries and bathrooms. It is so nice having all new appliances, something we've never had before. There are two big sky lights and Eric, being the electrician that he is, has installed excellent lighting to make the place nice and bright for Doreen. We still need lots of light fixtures and chandeliers yet though.

 

Here is a view towards the dinning area. As you can see from all these pictures, we still need to acquire some good living room furniture! The little room behind the doorway next to the base fiddle is referred to as "the banjo room". We insisted that this room have extra good sound proofing!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then to the right of that is the doorway into our laundry. The laundry is also a long hallway and short stairway that leads down and to the left to Eric & Sarah's place.

 

Just at the bottom of the stairs is a doorway into our garage. The garage has no room for a car, however, as it's the only place we have for all my woodworking machinery until we build a proper shop.

 

We really like the nice bay window in the dinning area! As you can see, this area also houses the library.

 

Well, there's Miss Travelaire sitting beside the house waiting and waiting; "What's the big holdup?" she says! Well, we have to get a few house things settled up before we leave, that's what. The backhoe in the right background is ours, and it's certainly paid for itself with all the work it has done around the property. The excavator (it's much bigger than it looks in the picture) is one that Eric managed to borrow for several months. He has constructed our septic system with it among other things.