Monday, February 26, 2007

Vancouver Home Show

We went to the homes show on Friday night, with the kids in tow. Deb wanted to go, to see some of the Hgtv celebrities, namely Colin and Justin from How Not to Decorate. Even though we got there early, we were near the back, and they were a little hard to hear.

After we browsed around the displays. The long hallway into the show was disappointing, I can only handle so many people selling household junk. We checked out some of the window displays, Loewen and Marvin. The windows look impressive in person, and they cost about what I thought they would. We'll see what the real cost is, when we go to purchase.
They had this really impressive hot tub there. It's not our thing at all, but I could appreciate the craftsmanship nonetheless. It stands about 20' high, and is all made out of concrete, but looks like natural granite, it had little caves leading from one pool to the next, and even had an upper pool with room for 2. It wouldn't even fit in our backyard, it was really cool though.
They had the log cabin there, that was displayed at the Torino Olympics. The construction is beautiful, it really does look like a display though, there wasn't even a door, or wall to enclose the bathroom.

We didn't get a lot done on the house this weekend, I wasn't feeling so good, and there was just too much family stuff to do. I did strip wallpaper off one of the walls in the nook. It looked like there was only one layer of wallpaper, and then paint underneath. I was wrong though, someone left the paper from a previous layer of wallpaper, and painted that. It's going to be hard to get off. We mostly started on this, because it looked so terrible, the wallpaper. The kids ripped off a few parts, because they were loose, and the wall was dirty, and couldn't be cleaned. I don't think it looks much better, but at least it's progress. I pulled up some of the floor too, to see what's underneath. There's a layer of vinyl tile, that really brittle, and then then it's a sheet of linoleum underneath. I used the heat gun, and got through that. There's a fir floor underneath, it looks like it's painted brown. We won't be pulling it up for a while, we have to wait until we're ready for the kitchen. It looks like it could have a nice floor underneath. Our neighbours had plywood nailed to theirs, and even with all the nail holes, it looks great refinished. Hopefully we'll have a more productive week, it's good to have a rest once in a while too though.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Derek and Deb:
Your Home Show experience rings true. Hoping you might email me back to discuss the art of houseblogging for an article I'm working on about Vancouver-area reno blogs.
I'm at sfralic@png.canwest.com

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Chris said...

If there's one job I hate it's walppaper removal. Good luck.

Anonymous said...

We went to a few home shows, but ours are too little to have HGTV stars at them - I'm still waiting to meet Jason from While You Were Out. I never see much of interest but Teague gets sucked into LONG conversations over building supplies. Seems like they are more for contractor types, or those looking to build a new house.

Derek said...

Yeah, I guess we're lucky to have such large home shows. A lot of stuff seems aimed toward new construction, or the kind of renovations I don't approve of, like making old houses look like new houses. I haven't been to one since I was a kid, so it was interesting.