Home From Lethbridge

When we got to Lethbridge on Sunday night we found the house covered in a thick layer of fine dust - the by-product of sanding the hardwood floors prior to refinishing them. It was on every surface of the house. I spent the first two days there wiping down walls, windows, vacuuming carpets, dusting every surface of the house upstairs and down, and dry mopping the new shiny hardwood. The dust was making Lloyd choke so he went out to the garage to do some much needed organizing there and got waylaid by boxes of old photo albums and a smaller box of love letters he sent to me during the two years before we were married. He wallowed in nostalgia for awhile there and brought them in to share with me. Fun stuff.

When everything was finally clean, our new furniture arrived. We decided that we'd retire most of our old furniture when Lloyd retires next year, so we're furnishing our retirement house with some new stuff. It was like starting out all over again. We're really looking forward to the time we can move down there and enjoy retirement.


This glass-fronted bookcase/china cabinet has been in my parents home for as long as I remember. I can remember having to take everything off the shelves (except the books on the bottom shelf) to dust it. Mum had a nice set of champagne glasses she kept on the top shelf, along with other dainty breakables. I love this piece of furniture and am glad Mum kept it for me. We brought it home from Winnipeg when we were there in May for Mum's 88th birthday.

This is a view of the dining room taken from the kitchen. We love sitting here in the morning when the sun is shining through the window. This room and the kitchen were carpeted when we bought the house (I hate kitchen carpeting - how do you keep it clean?!!!) so we had it removed and had fresh new lino installed. we got our dining room set out of storage (in the garage) and moved it into the room so we're finally able to use it again.

This is the living-room, with our new furniture. This room was carpeted when we bought the house and when we took it out we discovered that it covered maple hardwood, which was in excellent condition. So Lloyd and Mark (his nephew) sanded it all down and Mark put 7 coats of clear varnish on it. The maple looks beautiful now. We've ordered an area rug for the center of the floor to protect it and soften the look of the furniture against the wood.

Another view of the living room.

This is the master bedroom - fairly small by today's standards (the house was built in 1949 - the year Lloyd was born) but very adequate and able to hold the 8-piece bedroom set we bought for it. This floor was re-done as well.

This is the spare bedroom...furnished with some of our old stuff. It has a unique closet which doesn't start at the floor, but about 3 feet up the wall so it's kind of like a cubby hole but is high enough to hang clothes from a regular rod.

Another view of the living room in case you've forgotten what it looks like. We really, really like this room.

And that's it. I forgot to take pictures of the seven sets of blinds we installed but that's all right. You might find that boring. I'll take pictures of them when we get the sun room set up because that's where 6 sets of them are hanging.

So, while it's good to be home now, it's getting harder and harder to leave our retirement home five hours south of us. Our day will come though.