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Month: September 2024

Books in the Big Yellow Taxi

Books in the Big Yellow Taxi

There is a short story I read once about how Canada didn’t have a lot of famous authors because it was a cold country. I don’t remember much else except that I a> read it as part of my coursework either in university OR high school; b> it was in an anthology of short stories; c> for years I thought it was by Stephen Leacock. I have poured through Leacock’s collections, quizzed my librarian friends and have even begged on social media for someone to help me remember what this story was from. So far, nothing.

But in that process, I realized how fickle the world can be. Stephen Leacock was a HUGELY famous in his time, widely regarded as the world’s best humourist who went on to inspire other famous people such as Groucho Marx. Today though, probably the only reason we know of him is because of the required reading of Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town in high school. While I wouldn’t say he’s completely disappeared from literary scene, I feel that Leacock is only known to a contemporary audience because of the requirement to take Canadian Literature classes in high school & university. It’s the same CanCon phenomenon that makes the CBC turn out fantastic shows like Schitt’s Creek and Kim’s Convenience. I’m not mad about it.

I was disappointed – but not surprised – by the ruling against The Internet Archive recently. I suppose eventually it may end up like Napster – too visionary for its time and replaced by the bottom-feeding capitalism of Spotify who is lauded for what Napster was condemned for doing. In fact, the new partnership with google probably signals that very thing, exactly as now google will have its finger in yet another piece of our collective pie.

Still, bright lights exist. Today, I loved reading Vanishing Culture: on the impact of forgotten books by Brad Bigalow. It turned me onto his Recovered Books project. I love that people are out there preserving history and culture by bringing old works to the surface again.

My friend Sara argues with me about modern books, preferring to read works that stand the test of time. Her perspective is that, “Time is a sieve, and it weeds out irrelevant works.” But not all art and culture needs to be relevant 100 years from now. They can be perfect for helping people navigate the here & now and still be worth engaging with! Conversely, I also agree with AJ Jacobs in his book Breaking Bread With the Dead that we shouldn’t throw out all historical works just because they don’t align with our modern sensibilities, instead we should engage with them, be challenged by them. No need to give up the modern invention of the shower NOR throw the baby out with the bathwater. As the internet asks, “Why not both?”

I was surprised to see the Five Little Peppers and How They Grew in the Recovered Bookstore. I had this book as a child growing up in the 80s and it never occurred to me that it hadn’t really been a part of the modern bibliography, until now. But I guess it is the way of a lot of art and media: you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone.

PS: Incidentally, my friend Angela has been looking for a copy of Pump Up the Volume forever. She mentioned it was one of her fav movies of the 90s and wanted to rewatch it to see if it still held up. She mentioned that she couldn’t find it anywhere. I also tried to find it and noticed that it wasn’t anywhere: not on video websites, not on streaming services, not even on torrent sites! But low and behold – The Internet Archive has copy of it. HASHTAG BLESS.


Well in my day, sonny boy, we had this thing called RADIO…

Renovation inflation

Renovation inflation


Office real estate photos from our home’s listing in 2017

I have recently become obsessed with Alexandra Gater’s YouTube channel. She does a lot of budget-friendly & small space home décor and DIY projects and I especially love her StudioFix episodes. Having lived in a 530sq ft box in the sky with Mr. Tucker and a large dog, I would have appreciated more content like this in the early N’aughties. She points out that most home décor content is aspirational (and for most of us, unattainable) but it is very easy to change things up on a budget. There are some great ideas in her videos for people of all abilities and at the very least, the videos will show you how very small things can brighten up a space. Bonus: she’s in Canada and lists products we can get here.

Our kitchen is very small, especially for people who actually use their kitchen for cooking. We have a wheeled sideboard for extra prep space, which is a pain in the butt because it blocks the window & we also have a Kallax unit from Ikea that divides up the space. After watching the AG videos, Nick and I decided to replace these storage units with a kitchen island that has closed storage to open up our space a little & keep untidy things hidden. The kitchen will look better with less furniture crammed in it, less clutter will bring more light into a small space and we won’t have things piled up all over the floor or overflowing from the baskets in the Kallax.

But as I kept watching AG turned me onto companies who sell pre-painted replacement cabinet doors for Ikea kitchens. My mind was blown that these places existed! Since we have a tired, old Ikea kitchen (that was repainted before we got here. Think: this style) I thought it would be fun to investigate this as an option. I first started by measuring all of our cabinet doors. I then hit the Ikea site to see if they sold replacement door fronts. Sadly, that was a dead end: I could only find a few door front sizes. So I went to the websites that AG had recommended – and we discovered local companies who also did the same thing, so we also started researching those as an option. That didn’t last long though because most doors were $200 or more! We have TWENTY-THREE doors and drawer fronts in our kitchen. So we scratched that. Miss #1.

Next up, we found people who would custom make doors for a lot less than the above companies. But even then, these were also expensive and had shipping costs. Miss #2. Finally, miss #3 was when Mr. Tucker figured he could make some doors using his Tool Library Membership and booking some time in their studio and…at this point it was clear that the entire idea of a low-cost, low-time DIY was getting away from us. Our lives are busy enough, we don’t need to add any more HUGE projects to our chores.

We were suffering from Renovation Inflation aka, “we are already doing X, may as well do Y as well…” except for Y is an infinite number of projects, if you don’t check yourself. It is also how you end up spending more money, “well, we’re already paying $500 for a kitchen island, what’s a couple of doors?”

In the end, we sat down and really thought about changes that would make a huge difference in our lives and the biggest one? Paint. Our kitchen is a two-toned gray colour that darkens the entire space. So the walls needed to be painted. The cabinet doors are fine, as in, they are functional and not falling apart (ok, that one cutlery drawer is hot garbage). So in the end, we decided that we could probably get an entire kitchen refresh with a coat of paint. Even if we buy the REALLY GOOD cabinet paint a gallon of that will still be less than one cabinet door. Will it be as fancy? No. Will it be more modern? Still no. Will it brighten up the kitchen and make us happy? Yes.

Since we are saving money on the refresh we also decided to get rid of the metal peel-and-stick tile that was used in the kitchen. It’s super dark & dated and worse, it is peeling in places which could be a concern for water damage. Not only is it on the back splash behind the sink and stove but the previous owner also created a band around the entirety of the kitchen and the basement half-wall. Sadly, as Mr. Tucker started to remove it we realized that it was GLUED ON & taking it off is pulling some drywall down with it.

The plan is to start by filling the large chunks before sanding and painting. We will lay real tile (white, subway – we are pretty basic) behind the stove and sink (with the help of a local handyman) and the entire family will sand and paint the cabinet doors next weekend. Unfortunately, all of the doors and the walls will need to be cleaned with degreaser first before any of the actual painting can get started. We are hoping to do that in the evenings.

I feel like (despite the real estate photos) our kitchen is grey and cold and painting it white will give us a lot more light in the space. I am not looking for a super fancy renovation here, I want a usable kitchen that is bright and airy and where the windows aren’t half-covered by cabinets due to lack of storage.

Here is what it looks like right now:


The room is actually 9’3″ x 10’2″ – so, tiny

Here is what we are doing:
– Ditching broken storage (Kallax and cheap movable island)
– Removing old metal peel-n-stick tile
– Painting the entire kitchen white (walls and cabinets)
– Tiling the back splash on two walls with real tile
– Replacing the old light fixtures
– Putting in a closed storage island

I think in the end it is easy to let your imagination run wild with renovation inflation. But if you stop and breathe for a second and figure out what you truly need to refresh a space, the answers are usually small: a new coat of paint, some new cabinet knobs, a new ceiling light. I suspect the entire refresh of our kitchen will cost us less than 4 cabinet doors from one of those replacement door companies.

Check back in a week and a bit and I will let you know how it goes (with price breakdown).

Labour for Labour Day

Labour for Labour Day


UGH. Dark, dirty, cluttered and unusable

My friend Cory says that the real New Year is actually the first day of school. I am not going to lie: the first day after Labour Day does have fresh start vibes. I think it also helps that in Canada it often feels like fall comes in suddenly between that last week of August and the first week of September. For sure it also has a lot to do with the fact that we spend 14 years in school and even more if you head off to post-secondary school. With every new September, I loved the feeling of the fresh start with every school year. So when I joined the work world and was trudging off to work, I would see all of the kids during Frosh week & made me nostalgic and a bit sad. It felt like that fun time of my life was over and that all I had to look forward to was 40 years of drudgery in the form of a full time job. (SPOILER: thankfully, it didn’t end up like that though!)

When we moved into our house in December 2017, a month later in January 2018 I was diagnosed with PLS. So then came the most chaotic two years of us figuring out disability, managing emotions around disability, figuring out my work situation, dealing with a child who was upset with the move and the urge to TRAVEL RIGHT NOW TO ALL OF THE PLACES BEFORE YOU CAN’T DO ANYTHING ANYMORE. We did some travelling over the next two years and then found ourselves home-bound – much like the rest of the world – in 2020. Of course, that had its own challenges and while we gardened and had family activities to replace the ones we lost, we never quite unpacked or went through our things like we should have. Our new home had a ton of storage and when the kids outgrew things, we just stuffed it into a box in the back room.

Then this year, for some strange reason, I decided a week before our community garage sale that we would finally, FINALLY go through all of the junk we had stored for the past 6 years. Enlisting the children to help by bribing them, we went through all of the boxes. We sorted, we washed, we donated and we tossed a lot of stuff over that week and in the end we joined in the garage sale, it went well and the children made some pocket cash.

Un(fortunate?)ly, we also discovered that the seal on our toilet had failed and that the toilet had started leaking through the floor. I am glad we caught it when we did because it ended up being a cheap fix but it meant that we had to keep all of the storage out in the main rec room area of the basement while everything dried…and then – in true Tucker fashion – we just left it there.

Then a few stars aligned: the city decided that they would impose a 3-item max on garbage as of September 30th and at some point the amount of crap the kids would just toss around the basement became out of control. The laundry started seeping out of the laundry room into the main rec area and it was becoming clear that we had lost a lot of things to the giant pile that was growing beside the Eldest’s room. Enough was enough: something needed to be done.

That something came in the form of me, going downstairs. Stairs are typically difficult for me so I don’t usually head down to the basement despite the fact that we had installed a second railing and set up a small home gym last year. I kinda abandoned the home gym though because the lighting was so dark and with the black floors and dark brown walls it was just too depressing to go down there.

So it was clear that we needed to make a more inviting space. The Eldest is having a lot more sleepovers and it was embarrassing to watch them all sneak into her room and shut the door because the rest of the basement was so cluttered. Since we have a projector down there and some couches, I figured it would be nicer if the kids had their own little space to play video games or watch movies.

If we were going to do something with that space, it needed to be before school started and before the garbage restriction – so Labour Day weekend it was!

Last week the Eldest had stopped working and the Youngest was out of camps so we buckled down and sorted through the boxes. In the evening, Mr. Tucker organized them and put what we were keeping back in storage. On Thursday night we headed out and did errands managing to kill many birds with one stone (or one circular trip, as it were): we got school supplies, bought paint, porch dropped some things that I had put up on Buy Nothing, and the rest got dropped off at the charity store (for which we got a 20% off coupon for our next purchase!) all within 1.5 hours! It was glorious to finally see the hard work come to fruition. A couple of hundred dollars more would get us some floor lamps, couch covers and a Chromecast & then we were set: a basement we could use again!

The cost? (all prices in CAD)
$115.24 Couch covers
$158.15 Daylight mimicking lamps
$193.78 Paint & supplies (we could have made this cheaper but I consider the quality combined with the short window of opportunity to be worth just going for it)
$0 Chromecast (paid with a gift card that Mr. Tucker had but originally $39.99+tax)
—-
$467.17 total

But what is really great is being able to use our space again! I am no longer embarrassed to have the Eldest’s friends over and Mr. Tucker are going to design our workout schedule going forward.

Sure, I could have done it for less money and waited for sales on a variety of things. But there is a reason why we have the saying, “strike while the iron is hot.” In most of our days we struggle balancing having the time, energy and space to get larger projects accomplished. So when the stars align and we have able bodies and a 3-day weekend, I am going to eat the cost and have the goal accomplished. It makes no sense for me to wait it out to save $100 if in the end that means 5 more months (or more) of having an unusable space.


BEHOLD! A useable, bright amazing space!