Restore faith in humanity

We’ve signed the Part 2 of our agreement with the builder, so they are going ahead with the detailed plans for the laneway house.  The people up the hill in the big house got some (sort of) bad news, their current budget will not allow them to completely finish all the plans they have — they are going to have to cut up the remodel into smaller projects.  Right now they are looking at gutting the basement and completely building the studio suite, roughing in the rest of the basement to finish later.  When the laneway house is in place, of course, their property will be worth a lot more, and they could borrow enough to take on some of those other tasks.  They just don’t want to get in over their heads financially now by taking out a larger loan.

I am tidying up our shelves, so I put away some of the family photos until we are in our new home.  We’ll have to stage the condo to sell it — clearing out our personal belongings so potential buyers can more easily see themselves in the place.  We don’t want people thinking that they’re in OUR place, we want them to be able to see their things here.

We’re also replacing the builder-grade vanity bar lights in the bathrooms with new fixtures.  After we’d painted the bathrooms, DD suggested we swap out the ubiquitous bars with something more stylish.  We checked out the big box stores, but they were quite pricey and we want to do this as thiftily as possible.  We also looked at Craigs List, but most of the stuff there were fixtures people had pulled out of their bathrooms — the same ones we were replacing.  We wanted something nicer — but we know that one of the first places people make changes is in their bathrooms — why spend the money on something they are just going to tear out?

Then I remembered Restore, the retail outlet for the items Habitat for Humanity have donated.  It’s not just used stuff — although there are lots of used doors, shelves, and fixtures.  It’s obvious that sometimes builders get too much tile or flooring for a project, so the remainder goes to Restore.  We nipped up a couple of Sundays ago.  There were lots of friendly people to help, and within a few minutes we had found our lights.  Still in the box, they are easy to install and look great.