Month: June 2015
Summer
Strawberries picked from our garden.
Freshly painted buckets decorate the back deck.
Veggies are growing in beds and planters while the fence boards wait for a cooler day.
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New Hand Knit Items and a New Gallery
Handmade Works in Progress – Handmade in Canada
A “work in progress” post from my other site.
Coffee Press Sweaters and Margarita Mats are two of the items currently being made by hand by www.debra-hunter.com. Made of hand-dyed yarns, dyed in natural dyes, each item is completely made by hand. These make great Canadian gifts and are of course handmade in Canada.
To view more items from Canadian makers check out www.handmade-canada.com .
A Few Thoughts About Short Fences
Short fences.
We’ve spent a lot more time in the city this year and I have been watching the role short fences play.
Our corner lot has a short fence around our ground level deck at the front, and along the length of our backyard. We have discovered our short fence plays the role of being an invitation rather than a barrier.
Since the snow has melted we have had many discussions over the fence. We have met new neighbours and visited with ones we have known for years. We’ve talked about dogs and kids, vacations and music, yoga and knitting. We’ve heard of neighbours moving, summer construction projects, and visits to the Saturday Market.
The short fence creates an opportunity to be neighbourly. It lets neighbours talk. It creates community.
The whole experience has left me thinking a lot about neighbourhood design, building styles, and how they affect the general well being of a community. It is a well known fact that when neighbours know neighbours that it builds strong, healthy communities. People watch out for one another and communities are safer.
We live in a neighbourhood from a different era. Houses range in age from 110 years old to brand new infill housing, but it is still the old fashioned layout of big yards, boulevards and mostly detached garages. The layout of the older properties means that neighbours have the opportunity to interact. We see each other clipping hedge, mowing the lawn, building decks, pulling weeds and shoveling snow. High maintainance yards make for lots of opportunity to see your neighbours out and about.
However the few new infill houses, even though they are in the same neighbourhood, function differently, especially the ones that have attached garages. These are “new suburban houses” houses built in an old neighbourhood; attached garages, swaths of concrete driveway, a “low maintainance” garden (token shrub and mulch), and the compulsory prison like fences. The car disappears into the garage, with the neighbour never to be seen until the car emerges again. I can’t help but think of how damaging this design model is for a community. These styles of homes don’t allow for neighbourly interaction and fragment a community.
My short fence has left me appreciating how neighbourhoods were built in the past. They were built to create community. They were built so that neighbours would know their neighbours. Perhaps it is time for city planners to rethink how they are building current neighbourhoods. We need to bring back the front porch, bring back the low fence and eliminate the attached garage. It is time to take the streets our houses are built on and turn them back into communities.
My thoughts inspired by my short fence.
Blogging and a few pics for now….
Just a few thoughts on my current state of blogging as written on my “Island Home” blog.
It’s been weeks and weeks since I have posted on this blog. I seem to be questioning at the moment just “what” to do with my blogs and the direction they should take. Perhaps this is a common situation. Perhaps it is summer luring me away from the computer. Perhaps it is discovering the immediacy of Instagram. Perhaps I feel I am just saying the same thing over and over.
Most of my blogs have faced some challenges recently.
“H the Blog” has been luring request after request to use the images for free. I’m sick of managing the requests. It has made me hesitant to post any more quality images. Which leads you to wonder “Why blog?”. The best thing about blogging was sharing, but if you are reluctant to share images, the point in blogging seems to be lost. I guess I can continue to show “works in…
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Summer Diversion
I must admit my blogs have been scarce recently. It seems there have been lots of diversions. One big diversion is we are fence building. Of course to build this fence we have to remove the current fence that has been in place for 69 years. Digging up posts. Untangling roots. Removing huge rocks . Heritage properties bring challenges. We even unearthed a very old brick; my guess is from the building of the chimney of the house next door 110 years ago. It sounds like a lot of work, but strangely we are enjoying it. We have no doubt that completing the fence could possibly take the whole summer, but there are certainly worse things to be doing than working out in the sunshine.
(By the way, the wonky two by fours above the fence are our neighbour’s handy work….. we take no responsibility for that construction!)
Wawanesa Insurance problem….how can you be dinged for depreciation from before the property was built?
It’s the ongoing saga…….can anyone figure this out for me……..
We got an email May 19th 2015 from the new adjuster, it included this phrase…..
…..so we phone up the Lac Ste. Anne County Office, the county in which the cabin resides, and ask “What year was the cabin built?”
(crossing our “t”‘s and dotting our “i”‘s)
The answer 1963.
Anyone spot the problem?
For the cabin to be depreciated 55 years it would have had to be built in 1960…….it wasn’t built until 1963.
Wawanesa Insurance is trying to depreciate a property for 3 years BEFORE THE PROPERTY EVEN EXISTED.
Problem?
perhaps
Stay tuned…..there is so much more.
( I suspect this post is the pre-game warm up!)
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