Revelstoke Renos

When you go to a party in Revelstoke, people tend to talk about:

1) who's pregnant and when they're due
2) who's leaving Revelstoke to go to Smithers/Ontario/Newfoundland to be mortgage-free
3) whether you have firewood yet
4) renos

We are avoiding 1) and 2) and haven't quite got the hang of 3), but we dove full force into reno-land right from the get-go.

Work party to dig our drainage ditch - summer 2005 (photos by Chris Gooliaff)

The Vancouver crew

In addition to digging a ditch that first year, we also:
- painted every wall downstairs (it was all baby blue or pink sponge paint when we moved in)
- replaced the carpet with wood floors in the living room and built a lot of shelves
- put a new woodstove and hearth in the kitchen
- weeded the garden which hadn't been used for 4 years
- replaced all the fluorescent lights with nice light fixtures

Somewhere along the line we decided to build dormers upstairs. I didn't even know what a dormer was at the time. We started this project last June and finished last Friday. James was the superhero of this project - he did almost all the construction by himself (with some help from the internet). I basically painted things, varnished things and vapour barriered things. I'm ecstatic to have a dust-free house again. Here is the progress in pictures.

Pre-dormers

Cutting holes in the roof - the scariest step.

A finished dormer!

This is what we found under the flowery linoleum and 1940's newspapers.

James went nuts on shelves and cupboards. We just tripled the storage space of the cabin.

The office/gear room shelf

Our bedroom today. It used to be sponge painted dark grey-blue with lino and of course, no dormer. Now it's my favourite room in the cabin.