Ken and Tucker and I are officially on the road again. Although it HAS taken days of deliberation to finally take “the plunge” Plunge, that is, the trip down the hill from our house over snowy roads with our motorhome. We have been watching the weather reports, the road reports, and playing that all into our Christmas family plans and getting more stressed each day.

Although it is not clear from this, we have had about 3 feet of snow so far and Ken has been out plowing every few days to keep our “WAY OUT” open.

Ken has gone over the drive of the motorhome down the hill from our house, IN HIS HEAD, many many times. He was so relieved yesterday that he made it down the hill, and it went perfectly.

I drove the jeep down and we got almost to the main highway and he stopped and took off the chains.

So even though there were warnings about snow, we decided to leave because there is a very cold front on the way, starting on Christmas Day (today) Forecast was for -24 Celsius / -11 Fahrenheit, and we were deciding which was worse, the snow, or the cold. Now, when it is very cold, the road conditions are actually better usually because the very cold pavement becomes more sticky for your tires. However we were just not sure how we can keep the motorhome warm at those temperatures. Once all your stuff is packed, you are more or less committed to keeping the rig above freezing for the trip.( or all of your liquids will freeze, your electronics will freeze and your musical instruments (well you can imagine)). So once you are packed up, you ARE committed. We ALSO decided that once we were down the hill we were committed, NO TURNING BACK. Quite uncertain if we could get back up that hill with the motorhome. So we left yesterday and got as far as Kelowna.

We have gotten a lot done on our house since our last trip. We have started to fill in the holes we left in the floor, …….with …rocks. So here is the hole in the floor that has had plywood over it for the past year.

So Ken put a layer of concrete down to (fill in) the base of the opening.

I started applying mortar to the backs of the rocks and cementing them to 1/4 inch cement board. As you can see, our cutlery comes in handy.. we DO wash them before we eat with them 🤔

….. then we put the cement board (with the rocks attached) down into the hole. Once we had cemented the cement board down we grouted. We WILL need a sign upon entering our house…NO Stilettos!!!

We decided that the pattern needed a break and so inserted some left over tiles in the centre and continued on to the other end.

The green spotted rocks we collected from the Olympic peninsula because they JUST SO HAPPENED to match my kitchen cupboards. (well sort of)🐚🐚

Other projects we have done,…… I tiled the area to the right of the stairs with some cool blue tiles we found at Habitat for humanity (and agates) and ammonites.

So as we work on these projects a massive home is coming up in front of our house. We CAN still see the lake, but had never dreamed that someone would do this. We have never lived any where near such a massive home, let alone one in front of us……..We SHALL be planting a hedge…..

With covid and all of the shipping issues…. our kitchen lights have taken 8-9 months to arrive, but they were certainly worth the wait. ( I wonder if we had ordered them and NOT liked them, would we have had any options 🤔) WE DO LOVE THEM.

We HAD started these windows last year, but got lazy over the summer… just cement board on either side of the windows.

Then….. with tiles we found at Habitat for humanity (Restore) we placed them around the lead glass window

We liked them so much we ordered more of them and put them around all of the lead glass windows.

So we are feeling QUITE accomplished about our house, although my pictures are designed to ONLY show the good stuff. We have plenty more jobs to get going on to really finish. But it was time to get moving. We tend to miss seeing the ground. Perhaps too many winters spent in places that did not get snow. We have both had 3 vaccines for covid, and have loaded up the motorhome with the fruits of our summer labours and hope to not spend a lot of time around other people. At least not a LOT of people. I am quite confident that this new variant of covid mutated to become much more infectious, but much less virulent. Maybe it will become the beginning of the end of covid. We can hope.🤞🏻🤞🏻🤞🏻

🎉 🎉 🎉 🎉 🎉 🎉 🎉 🎉

Merry christmas from Ken and Tucker and me. MUCH LOVE. Thanks for reading.