Tricia's Musings

Random Thoughts about life in general, living in the big city of Toronto



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Archives for 2008

How to keep the dog from damaging our couch?

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Lately I’ve been wondering how much longer our leather couches will look good. We’ve been letting our puppy get up on the couch so that she can sit with us, but occasionally she’ll try to bit the couch or tries to dig in the seats. I wonder what the couches will look like 6 months from now?

I’d love it if our basement was finished already. I’d move our couch, loveseat and lazyboy chair downstairs and use it like leather home theater seating set since we plan to set up a home theater in the basement if we go the rec room route.

I really don’t mind having the dog on the couch … well as long as our furniture can stand up to it.

Do you let your dog or cat on the couch? How do you keep them from ruining your furniture? Just keep telling them no when they are doing something that might damage the couch?





Clean house and cleaner air too

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Even though I’ve been feeling terrible the last few days Chris and I did manage to get some housework done on Monday. He was off work, as he often is on Mondays, and late in the afternoon we decided it was time to vacuum. It was the first time we vacuumed around our puppy.

Now don’t get the wrong idea and think we live in a pig sty. We don’t have any carpeting in our house so dusting, sweeping and mopping regularly is usually sufficient. However, every once in a while it’s good to pull out the vacuum and do a thorough job of cleaning.

We had no idea how our puppy would react to our very loud vacuum.

I had a feeling she’d be ok with it as she doesn’t seem to mind when I use my blow dryer and the groomer said she was interested in their big blow dryer when she was being dried off at the groomers last Monday. Still … you just never know how an animal might react to something new so we wanted to try out the vacuum when Chris and I were both home. That way one of us could comfort her or totally remove her from the room if she started to freak out.

Turns out that she loved the vacuum. Chris started the vacuum and she went right up to it and acted as if it was a new toy to play with. She didn’t seem to mind the noise at all and was happy to watch as Chris vacuumed all of the dining room chairs, the inside of the air registers and so on.

It’s good to know that we can pull out our vacuum whenever we need to now and know that the dog won’t be upset by the noise. We just have to make sure she doesn’t bite the cord or the vacuum hose when we aren’t looking!

I’ve always found this house to be a little dustier than I think it should be … well compared to newer houses anyway.

I think it’s because we have an older furnace system – an oil furnace actually, and also because our 1927 triple brick house is made of lathe and plaster. Well the interior walls are made of lathe and plaster I mean! I’m also sure it doesn’t help that our living room dining room ceiling has had a bit of work done on it and is currently waiting for us to put up that tin ceiling I’ve been talking about for ages.

Sometime in the future we’ll think about changing over to gas heating. At that time we’ll also need to get a new furnace. I’m sure a new furnace with better filters or an air cleaning system on the furnace will make a huge difference in the amount of dust in the house!

Oh, on Saturday we splurged and got two air purifiers. Chris and I both smoke. Yes I know – we’re bad. We plan on quitting soon. We figured that the air purifiers will help with the air quality in our home too as they clean the air of dust, pollen, smoke, mold and bacteria particles. They are Honeywell Hepa air purifiers with permanent filters.

We were going to get one big air purifier, however since the air purifier should be located in the area that we sit in and smoke in most often to be most effective we figured a big one, one large enough to clean the air in a large open living room dining room would be too noisy to sit be side we opted to get two of the next size down. So we got two medium sized air purifiers. One is near where we sit in the living room and the other is at the other end of the room in the dining room.

So now our house is really clean and the air should be a lot cleaner too!

Do you use air purifiers in your home or do you have a funny story about your pet and vacuums or other cleaning equipment?

Get 25 percent off a dozen roses

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If you’ve only read my blog for a couple of weeks you’ll already know that I love roses. I often post photos of the roses I grow in my garden or talk about my garden in some way. Trouble is, I live in a cold climate so I only get to enjoy my roses during the warm months of the year.

I start jonesing for some pretty flowers and color by this time every year. I bet that a lot of women do! Good thing Valentines day will be here soon.

Are you looking forward to Valentines Day? Have you made any special plans to treat the one you love? A dozen roses and a romantic dinner are the two basic ingredients for a lovely Valentine’s day celebration.

Of course romance, roses and romantic dinners need not only be for Valentines. I think we should treat our loved ones to special days all year round.

If you’re planning on giving flowers to your special someone on Valentines you might want to visit 1800flowers.com. I just noticed that they have a special on their bouquets of a dozen roses. They are offering 25% off. With that discount you might want to send a dozen roses to a good friend, your mother or other family members. You can order red, peach, pink, yellow or white roses.

While you are visiting the site you might want to take a look at their flower arrangements, flower and or plant baskets, plants and gift baskets. Their food gift baskets sound fantastic. They have everything from fruit baskets to organic food baskets, gourmet food baskets, cakes, cookies, chocolate and candy, wine and cheese baskets. They sound yummy! Check it out.

Lego my skull!

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Wordless Wednesday

Lego my skull!

Isn’t it amazing all the things that you can do with Lego these days?

I haven’t looked at a set of Lego’s in ages, but I take it that they make them in a lot more shapes and sizes than they did when I was a kid. Some of them must be flexible too.

Have you ever made any interesting creations with Lego?

Our neighbors are trying to sell their house in January – Good Luck!

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Well our neighbors home is up for sale again! They must really want to move. Who puts their house up for sale in January the coldest month of the year here in Toronto?

Once they took their for sale sign down and said they were getting some repairs done on the house (changing from oil to gas heating, new furnace and who knows what else) I didn’t really expect to see a for sale sign go up before March or April.

I think in Northern climates most people who are thinking of selling their homes try to put it up for sale in the early Spring. I’ve never sold a home, but that’s certainly the time of year that I went looking to buy a house.

In my personal experience that’s a good time to look for a new home. The snow is melting or melted so you can see the whole house – foundation and all. I mean, you want to be able to see if there are any problems right? Sure you can get an inspection done, but everything’s easier when you can actually visualize the whole house and structure. The yards also look better too which makes the houses more appealing.

Also, when I went searching for a home to buy I saw probably close to 50 homes. The majority had leaky basements. How do I know? Well it rains quite a bit in the spring and a lot of the houses literally had puddles of water in the basement. Some had several inches of water. In fact, I think this house was the only one with a dry basement. I knew right away that the foundation was probably in great shape! That’s something that you wouldn’t be able to tell very easily when buying a house in the dead of winter!

As far as I’m concerned they might as well have a sign on their lawn saying Tennessee land for sale for all the good putting their house up for sale now will do them. I wish them luck, I really do … but their house still needs a lot of work. They haven’t modernized it at all. Perhaps they are thinking a desperate home buyer will come along.

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