Spring is in the Air

Do I write a post with that title every year?

Well it's currently about minus 40, but there is something about the light out there that tells me that true spring is right around the corner. The weight is lifting in all respects: I see a little patch of grass showing through the snow on my lawn and it is green. The light is rich and warm, no longer the harsh blue light of winter. The birds seem happier. And it looks like 1982 at the end of our laneway, as my husband has agreed to discard a number of things from our basement in our first movement towards spring cleaning.

Big plans are, as always, afoot; I was slowed by the baby for a little while but I'm back in fighting form. The only difference is that I am now using my poor husband as my arms and legs where the heavy lifting is concerned.

I have just completed a mini-renovation of my back office. For years it was the zone that everyone had to walk through to get to the bathroom so it received heavy traffic, yet was the one horribly untouched area of our house. We painted one wall and re-did the floors, but left the nasty barnboard siding on the other wall, threw our big ugly desktop computer back there, stacked up a bunch of junk and never really thought about it again. A few years ago I ripped the barnboard off of most of the wall and realized too late that the nails holding it on were 4" long and tore the crap out of the dark-purple drywall underneath. It was a mess. Spider webs covered the ceiling, the baseboards were long gone, there were holes all through the plaster, and we'd for years just stuck thumbtacks all over it indiscriminately.

So over the past month I tore the remaining barnboard off of the arch, patched the holes, painted the ceiling, bought the craziest light fixture off of ebay, painted the wall a lovely deep plum/chocolate colour, bought, painted and installed new baseboards, painted the light fixture pumpkin orange, bought and installed some shelves from Ikea, and bought a bunch of new officey storage containers in bright colours to hide my junk. It looks marvellous if I do say so myself. Makes me want to sit at the desk and play office.

Next up, we are re-doing our basement, switching the bedroom (currently holding my project-type stuff and baby things from other people) and the main room (currently hubby's fishing room). Hubby will install his stuff in the bedroom so the door can be closed to contain the spread of fishing stuff throughout our basement, and the main room will become a kind of rec room where we can do crafts when Nora gets older and hang out when it's too hot outside. As well, it can be used as a spare room when and if people ever visit us again, since there's an adjacent bathroom. We'll see how this goes.

Before all that happens, this week I am converting the space in our kitchen where our wall oven used to be into a proper pantry with six shelves. I can hardly wait. I've bought shelving material, new doors and hardware, but the first step – hopefully completed tomorrow – will be the demolition. I am taking away the cupboards above and below the oven hole and making it a full-height pantry, so we'll see how it goes. Oh I am so excited by the prospect of new storage space you have no idea.

About two weeks ago, Nora and I planted this year's crop of veggie seeds, and now we have a little garden going on in the grow-op – two varieties of tomatoes, hot yellow wax peppers and basil are up. Thai basil didn't happen this year, and I haven't started the squash etc. yet. Before all of this goes into the ground, I am going to till the entire veggie garden – scraggly perennial plants be damned – and add in some compost and peat moss. I do the compost/peat moss thing every couple of years or so and it seems to make zero difference; my soil is still hard clumping clay. I don't know where it all goes.

And then onto the big kahuna of projects. When Nora was born, I laboured under the impression that her crib would stay in our room for the first 6 months, and then she'd move to her room downstairs on the main level. We decorated it and moved the t.v. out and have been hanging out back there all day every day since. However. The reality is, I'd like her to be in our room for a year or so. I still reach over and check her about 4 times a night. After that year is up, I have discovered that I'm just not comfortable having her on a different floor, for a number of reasons: fire, intruders, I can't hear her down there, and it's just too darn far for night terrors, potty training and other after-dark needs. So. We are considering turning our large master bedroom and two large walk-in closets into a smaller master bedroom, small nursery-style bedroom, and powder room, all on the upstairs level. We would have to live with a normal closet (shared! The horror!) along one wall of our room, and we'd lose some circulation and furniture space, but I have been dithering about it for a few weeks and I just don't see another way around it without breaking the bank completely and changing the structure of our house. If we weren't planning on building a cottage next year, we'd probably sell and buy a larger house, but that's not currently in the books as we wouldn't be able to do both financially. Funny thing is, my childhood home is for sale and it would be close to perfect. Its pros include having four bedrooms, two bathrooms, an office, a dining room, a large sunken living room and a separate garage, not to mention the comedic value of buying my childhood home. Its cons include the Vietnamese-run grow-op in the condemned house next door, a crazy woman who I would rather avoid living down the street, and the house possibly being haunted. Hm Hm. I think we're going to just go ahead and live with a smaller bedroom.

Also on the books this spring: mapping out the placement of our cottage and starting to cut down trees, probably fixing up our trailer a little bit, doing a bit of work around the brother-in-law's cottage (planting wildflowers, rescuing his errant dock), pruning the apple trees in front of our house, and getting rid of the old Saturn in our yard. Holy mac we are busy. The advantage is: I am home full-time, so I can manage the gardening and act as project manager for the upstairs reno. People yet-to-be-hired will do the work upstairs. Hubby can do the cottage stuff on the weekends and between fishing trips. Nora is going to learn that her mummy and daddy are active, and there's always some kind of project on the go.

I have one more big project in the wings, but I'm saving that post for another day. Suffice to say, it is a very busy spring for all of us, but now that the grind of winter is over, everything seems doable.