sweetgeorgia

Upstairs, downstairs

Since July 1st, we’ve been in the midst of a crazy renovation/moving extravanganza. Essentially, I’m leaving my lovely, but inconvenient, office in Gastown and coming back home to occupy one of the big rooms downstairs.

All of Saturday, we moved everything in the spare room upstairs to the new storage room downstairs and then my incredibly supportive friends helped paint the spare room (Behr Soothing Celadon) so that I could have a fresh new room to house the loom, yarn, spinning stuff, and my temporary office.

Sunday was our annual BBQ/carnivore fest and as per usual, Rich was up at 6 am to smoke the pork and the party ended in the wee hours of the morning with poker and spinning. Some of our guests had never seen a spinning wheel before, so I treadled while they tried drafting.

Also at the BBQ were some old highschool friends — two of whom were dating in highschool, got married last year and then started a design company called ["Light Couture International"](http://www.lightcouture.com/). They design custom furniture items that incorporate light! Teejay writes a design blog called ["teejay's backsplash"](http://backsplash.lightcouture.com) and is also a contributor for [MoCo Loco](http://www.mocoloco.com/). Maybe I can convince them to incorporate fibre into one of their pieces?!

These guys, plus ‘Cisco and Des, came back a few hours later on Monday (we all need a _little_ sleep) to help Richard gut the downstairs office space (did I mention how lucky we are?). Here’s what the space looked like…

Yesterday, Rich and Steve (the reno/builder/contractor extraordinaire) put in insulation (because there was none) and it looked like this…

This morning, we were up at 6 am so that I could go to the store and pick out lighting fixtures. Who knew it could be so complicated? Anyhow, the drywall is being delivered today and soon the space will start looking more finished. I still have to pick paint colours… by tomorrow. All this work needs to be completed by Friday because we’ve reserved a moving van for Saturday morning and (yet) more furniture will be coming home from Gastown.

During all this, I did find some bits of time here and there to assemble the loom. It was really quite easy — kind of like IKEA but with more pieces and better wood. I even completed a tie-up for four shafts so that I can start weaving my turquoise silk scarves (there is a locking pin that holds the unused shafts in place)… but having moved all my yarn and stuff around the house, I can’t find the silk warp now.

Good long weekends

On Saturday, the DH and I hosted our annual backyard BBQ, sort of in celebration of the Canada Day long weekend. Since he discovered the idea of bbq competitions and championships, he’s become a little obsessed. Last year, our friends and I bought him a big smoker that he’s learned to use to make pulled pork. He smokes the pork over 12 hours which means that on BBQ day he’ll get up at 5:30 am to set up the smoker. Crazy, I say… but here he was by the time I woke up (6:30 am):

By the afternoon, some of our friends had arrived for an early poker game (this year the DH received a 500-chip poker set for his birthday)…

Of course, there was food and drink…

…and of course, there was a little knitting:

All the rest of the BBQ photos are here in the gallery »