Another step closer!

Well, we did it.  We decluttered, fixed up, painted and prepped the house, and sold it!  On Canada Day (July 1st), we moved all our worldly posessions down home to Saint John, New Brunswick.

This is a big step for us!  It's something we've been wanting to do for a long time, and suddenly the stars and planets aligned:

• I changed to a different team and started working from home
• I got really, really tired of our crappy satellite internet connection for working at home ;-)
  
• The housing market was hurting in Ottawa, but started an up-swing
• I took the lawn tractor to a shop for some work and mentioned that I didn't want to spend much on it because I'd be giving it to whoever bought our house, and the owner of the shop turned out to be in the market for a house!
• The buyers had already sold their home, and were motivated to downsize to a smaller house with land (our place fit the bill perfectly).

So now we're down home, with our stuff stored at Laura's parent's place and living at my Mom's place.  Definitely a temporary situation.  :-)

We figured it would be a perfect opportunity to build our dream home out at the Drawlyn, but after a bunch of research we've determined that it's not feaible at the moment to get any form of high-ish-speed internet out there.  And I need that for my job.  I made do with crappy satellite internet for too long at our place in Ottawa.

Since we can't get any real form of high-speed internet out at the Drawlyn, we're going to have an "urban interlude" in our plans.  We've bought a house on the west side of Saint John (closes Oct 1st), and plan on gradually building a "cottage" out at the property on the Drawlyn.

Over time, we'll gradually improve the cottage (still plan on building an earthship design), and eventually a better Internet option will be available to us.  At which point we'll move out to the homestead full-time and sell the west side house.

Things are going well.
Grant and Laura

Yoghurt Making

I haven't made yoghurt for many years but last month I became really annoyed looking at all the containers in the recycle bin. Since we added yoghurt to our daily diet the soya milk cartons, soya yoghurt containers, and cow yoghurt containers started to add up at an alarming rate. So I did a bit research and found Bryanna Grogan's site on soya yoghurt making and haven't turned back. There are still the plastic bags off the soya beans and the cartons from the cow's milk but it has significantly reduced the packaging. Once we move I hope to buy milk in returnable containers and local soya beans in bulk until I'm able to grow my own.

The soya bean to yoghurt process isn't hard but it is a bit time consuming. This is some of the finished product the whiter stuff on the left is cow and the creamier coloured one on right is soya. This is also most of the basic equipment for making the soya yoghurt. But I have a soya milk maker in the mail! That will automate some of the process.

Making progress on getting back to the Drawlyn

It's been a long time since we posted to the old blog. It's time to rectify that situation. :-)

For a long time we had not made any progress on our plan to get back to the Drawlyn. Grant's job situation didn't make it easy to work at home. With the transition to a different team, that has changed. Now, as long as he has an Internet connection, he can login to work.

So now it's time to get the plan to move down to Saint John, New Brunswick into high gear.

The first step was to start decluttering and getting rid of things we no longer needed/wanted (or well, didn't want too much). Now, we've moved on to fixing up the house so it shows well.

Recently we went down home and visited for a week, and looked at a few houses while there.

The plan is to move to Saint John to be with family, and start building the "dream home" on the property.

While we were there, we visited Laura's aunt and uncle, Pat and Jim, at their 'Camp' and Sugarbush operation. We had a great time. Here are a few pictures from the visit.

It was a gorgeous day for a walk in the woods, collecting sap.
The dog was running around like a crazy thing after being in town on a leash for all her walks. All the hills, woods and streams are Jordan heaven. Here she is posing on a mossy boulder.




Here you can see some sap being collected.









As I said, we've been making some progress on the house. We are just finishing up the kitchen and bathroom, and here are a few pictures of the progress and what's left to do.














The kitchen is almost done. We got rid of the extra pantry, painted and trimmed the walls, painted and replaced the hardware on the cupboards among other things.






Still to do: install a different set of hinges and hardware on the cupboard over the stove.







Here's a view of the dining room all set up and ready for poker:











The living room was a big job. It took a few coats of primer to cover up the previous color scheme. The new coat of paint and trim really dresses it up.

Within a week we should be ready for the all important dressing and staging of the place. New curtains throughout and art back on the walls and new furniture arrangement to show the place to its potential. It's been a great place to live so we want others to see that too.

Who knows, maybe the place will have hens again.

Cheers,
Grant and Laura