7.11.2012

Upside Down House = Living Simple

Lately our house has been upside down! I mean that literally, as mentioned in my previous post we had a bathroom saga issue. In the old house the vanity was custom built (who builds a 43" vanity!!!) I searched high and low for a vanity because the one in the house was outdated and for selling purposes we really needed to change it. If I wanted a custom vanity made it would cost us probably over $1000 which was way out of our price range for something we are selling. When we measured the vanity we thought it was 42" and my mom god bless her she always has random things in her basement and had a brand new updated modern 41" vanity top with sink(my parents built a brand new home) so she offered us to take it and see if we could make it work. We ripped off the top of the vanity and laid the new one down. It looked ridiculous. So off to home depot to see what options we had, we picked out a 36" vanity and decided I would go back in the morning and purchase it. 

Back at home we ripped out the remaining part of the vanity and realized the previous home owners did not continue the hard wood all the way to the wall. WTF! Why do people do this! Now our issue was the vanity we picked out was elevated from the floor and you would see that there was no flooring! We couldn't find anything in Canada that would fit properly so I searched the US Home Depot website and found a vanity that would work in the space. It was only $279 and came with a mirror as opposed to the Canadian one which was $499 for vanity and mirror. 

The old vanity:



The new vanity:


It hasn't been installed yet because the old mirror had to be ripped out and we needed to fix the drywall. Tonight I will paint and then we can install the new vanity. It certainly isn't the most fanciest vanity or something we would have picked if we were staying here but for selling purposes it is 100 times better then what we had! 


And now for the living simple part of this write up! Because the house is upside down and it has been so nice outside we have been eating outside. The problem is we moved so much stuff we don't really have anywhere proper to eat so we made a little eating area that will do for now! Haha Branko took a picture and said "this is what simple living is all about" :)


Yup, you are seeing that correctly. The step ladder is holding our salad! 


And now for some news about our new home, this came in the mail yesterday:




We are going to apply for managed forest tax incentive program. We had to pay somebody to come and analyse the property. Basically what it is, is if you have a large piece of land and most of it is forested you can apply for a tax incentive so long as you don't cut down all of the trees you get a tax reduction. ****sort of saving the trees idea**** It was neat to learn about the land history and any tax break is good for the bank account :) 

Is there a tax incentive program that you are a part of or know about??? I would love to hear about! 








2 comments:

  1. I did not know such a tax break existed! My parents own 2 100 acre stretches of land, but I'm guessing that neither of them would qualify since a good 60%, maybe 70% of the land is fields. This is good to know, though, for that day somewhere in the future when we get ourselves out of the big city and, preferably, onto an acreage of bush!

    ReplyDelete
  2. You can also get a tax break for farm land! There are tons of farmers out there who want to rent farm land and once your land is farmed you get a tax break. I think it's actually better then the forestry tax break. We looked into this extensively when we were buying land.

    ReplyDelete