It’s been a jam-packed summer (much like this blog post is going to be!) and here are a few highlights: We had such a good time in the San Juans last year that we went back for another week. Here’s Nyah botanizing at Sucia Island. Salt Spring also had a music festival!  The adults enjoyed watching a slate of great bands . . . . . . while the kids mostly ran around the field in packs. Construction…
We can live in our house!  On Oct 31 we got a conditional occupancy permit and are free to move in.  We still have a few things to do before the building inspector will give his final approval, but we can move in! (and who needs proper stair railings anyways?). In any case, we’re still living in the trailer while we do a few final jobs, but now that my sister is living with us and we have a dog, we’ve got…
Just in case any one still checks on this very neglected corner of the web, I thought I’d put up a few photos to show how things are going around here. The house is coming along and we hope to be in this fall.  Not that the RV has been bad, but I won’t miss having to get a kid up before I can turn their bed back into our table. Here’s the current status (please focus on the lower right corner and not…
Over the last couple of months we have stopped the destruction (or at least slowed it down) and begun some construction around here! We’ve started with bathroom renos  (ie removing the horrible makeshift outdoor tub). and working on the w/c (why does Doug always pose for the the bathroom shots?!) The kids are getting into the construction. We even hosted the first meal in our house (-shaped object, it’s not a real house yet) and afterwards…
It’s been a busy few months. On March 1st we took possession of 5 gorgeous acres here on Salt Spring Island. It came with a few extras: . . . and on March 2nd we lit our first burn pile, ordered a dumpster, and put a trailer hitch on the Echo. For a brief time we owned this school bus, this cut-out of the USS Enterprise, several toilets, this hovel, and this hovel. We’ve borrowed trucks, had lots of help…
For the kids’ 2nd birthday I decided to make them a play kitchen. It all started when I saw a cool one online that someone had made based on an Ikea nightstand. At first I had planned to just do the same, but since we have no Ikea here, we had to start from scratch instead (actually Ikea would have happily sent me one of their $20 nightstands, if I had happily paid them $40 in shipping). The kids and…
Way back in September we decided that since our family had suddenly doubled in size we would need a new dinghy. Unfortunately we wanted it all, something both big (enough for all 4 of us) and small (enough to be easily lifted and stored aboard), something cheap (in dollars) and high end (in construction). The laws of both physics and economics were against us. Nothing fit the bill until Doug got the idea that we would build a nesting dinghy….
In past years we’ve heated the boat with a Dickinson Newport diesel fireplace, but we were always a bit nervous to run the fireplace at night and usually just used a small electric heater after we went to bed.  This resulted in a few funny instances, most notably the time we woke up to find the temperature had dropped overnight and our breath had coated the entire overhead of the v-berth with ice, but mostly it just resulted in arguments about…
We’ve been meaning to do this for years (3 to be exact) and finally got around to it now. Â A good scrub, light sanding, and three coats of Ultimate Sole made a huge difference.
Sonrisa has always sat a little low in the bow.  According to the original owner this was due to a mistake when her lead ballast was poured.  As a result water didn’t drain quite right on deck or in the bilge.  The problem was made worse when we installed a newer lighter engine.  So we decided to add 500lbs of lead to an extremely inaccessible area of the bilge, directly under the engine and all the way aft. We could not physically…