The husband has been looking at electric cars for awhile now, but getting serious about it just this year because of, well, gas prices. And the technology. And the future. Setting up a home charging station for an EV car in the garage dovetails nicely with the swap out of our old fuse based electrical panel in the breaker style panel that we’ve been talking about having done since we bought his house over a dozen years ago.

So, he pulled the trigger on it in September after finding someone who could and would do the work for us. If not for the pandemic, this would have been a swap we did two years ago even though we wouldn’t have thought about the EV component in any serious way. I’m happy he lobbied me for it. Now we are ready for the future of cars!

And this is this is the crown jewel of this reno. The item that will help us, or whomever owns this house, when EV cars are finally affordable. The future is closer now. The whole project was worth every penny (SO many pennies).

For the last three months, we have been in home reno mode. We were already talking about doing something in some areas of the house (the dining room space, specifically) when we had an issue with the bidet attachment on our upstairs toilet leaking and cracking a few of the floor tiles from the water damage. There is no way of telling how long it was leaking based on the damage we saw after opening up the bulkhead, but we did see it wasn’t the first leak that toilet had, and ours was just the latest. The new wood planks in the pictures are replacements for any of the moldy, rotted out old planks that suffered from past toilet leaks.

How we discovered this problem was one day there was a gross rust colour water on my kitchen counter that I couldn’t trace at counter height after moving all kinds of stuff out of the way, so I started to look around, and then up. EEK.

I turned on all the kitchen lights, and that’s when I saw a huge wall bubble of water behind the paint where the ceiling/bulkhead/wall meet. The paint I just put on those walls four months earlier. Ugh. I pointed it out to the husband, and he started poking around. While at work the next day, the husband used his staycation time to literally poke the bubble to empty it. All over my barely covered counter and cooking tools/spice racks. *sigh*

But that’s not the only thing he poked open. I came home to this above pic visual. So after a quick text consultation with my contractor brother, we set up a big fan and let it air dry for a few days while we assessed the damages and bought materials to replace and fix up the ceiling, wall, wood, drywall, and paint. Luckily the husband was able to do all of this while I worked that week, so I wasn’t in his way and he had loads of time to get it done properly without feeling like he needed to rush this job. That was the last thing I wanted, but at the same time, being without a full functioning kitchen for almost 1.5 weeks was a bit tiresome. I was glad to have my cooking space back, let me tell you.

And I couldn’t be happier with the work my husband did in there. I honestly have to look hard to see where this all went down on that wall and along the bulkhead. We stopped the leak for now, but eventually we will need to rip up our bathroom tiles. Issue there is those tiles match the ones on the shower walls, so… It will be a job, for sure.

There are touch-ups that need to be done in the kitchen, but now he’s eyeballing the light fixture as something he wants to replace with pot lights, and well, that just means more painting in the future, so we’ll leave the corners and edges for then.

But in the meantime, I was getting continually frustrated with lack of storage space in my kitchen and dining room to fully store all of my ‘kitchen shit.’ So, the husband finally cracked and created something for me in the IKEA building planner, and after I signed off on it, he went shopping. That’s a post for another day very soon. And I took pix. 🙂

And we did a few other projects that I will post about when I have some time this week.

Sándwiches con forma de ataúd

Will be making my own version of these this year. I can’t not make them. They are just too damn adorable to ignore.

So, I bought an air fryer.

I picked up a 5.8Qt basket style Cosori Air Fryer from Amazon.ca, and so far, I’m liking what it can do. I’ve only figured out three things (four if you include ice cream making) things you can’t do with an air fryer (cook pasta noodles, make rice, and pop popcorn properly), so the world is still my oyster. 🙂

I resisted getting another air fryer for years but after I realised they had changed so much, I was open to the idea of getting one. This time, instead of someone else picking a hot new small kitchen appliance for me as a gift, I wanted to do some research, set a criteria, and find a machine that satisfied my budget of the $100-150 mark. And I did it.

I was looking for a small in height, but big in capacity, machine that allows me to do loads of different food types and to do a lot of each in one go. I love to cook once, and eat at least three times.

I was also looking for something with easy dials I could move with my hands versus pushing buttons. Pushing buttons all day at work has me longing for the old days of dials for some reason. And I wanted a basket versus a toaster oven style. I wanted to shake up my food at the half way mark, not take a whole tray out and flip food. I also carefully looked at the clean up for both styles out there, and for me, the basket was a no-brainer. This machine is very easy to clean. And I have loads of accessories kicking around I can use in the basket when it comes to food types like baking an egg in a silicone muffin cup as I roast tater tots in the basket around it.

First night I had it, I made toast first (to check out any hot spots, and to rid me of that new machine smell. After that, of course I made frozen French fries in it. D-uh! I managed to burn AND dehydrate them because I’m not a big fan of cooking or baking fries, so I got the temp and time all wrong. Hee.

And then I tried my hand at the only recipe in the manual that interested me: apple fritters. There weren’t bad, but they could be so much better! The don’t store well, so if you make these, share them with others as soon as you pour your glaze over top. Tasty. the texture needs work, but the flavours are good enough.

I’ve had this fryer for just shy of two weeks, and I tend to do things like grilled cheese sandwiches (a fave in this house), roasted tots using smoked baked potatoes the next day (amazing), and muffins using a mix and some add-ins (dead easy). I also tried to cook dumplings in it but I overshot the temp and time, and it came out like so frail Pavlova cookies. Ugh.

A couple of days ago I tried my hand at jammy and hard boiled eggs. The first attempt didn’t produce fully cooked yet jammy eggs, and the hard version had brow spots on the egg white after the shell was cracked open. I am not deterred. I will crack this mystery. (See what I did there? Oh, you did? I’ll show myself out now.)

Today I made enchiladas after I roasted a jalapeno, a Shepard’s pepper, and a yellow pepper to make a very good salsa. I used the salsa to hold the filling together and then I smeared a bit on each tortilla before laying down the filling and cheese. I will do a post on this separately soon.

(Sad Face emoji)

I was reaching backwards to for the glass jar I kept my coffee grinds in that has a glass topper that has a rubber gasket seal to keep it all fresh, but I noticed a few weeks back it was starting to feel loose but it still held up if I pushed down on it to ensure it was fully sealed closed.

The other day I was listening to a podcast with my headphones on, running around the kitchen, and forgot to push the topper down before I picked it out by the lid to bring it across the floor to the other counter.

Fatal mistake. I paid the price for that. F**k.

And if that wasn’t bad enough… and it is, I was in bare feet at the time. I had to gingerly back out of the kitchen scanning the floor for shiny glass fragment before putting each foot down.

I have never been so happy to have such a small kitchen (7.5′ x 7.5′) in my life!