The long-awaited photos of our house as it looks today are finally live! I should have a good excuse for not posting them sooner, but I don't. It has something to do with the amount of time I knew it would take to prepare the images and do the write-up - then not havng the time to do it (going away to Cancun for nine days didn't help my project list very much!). I'm writing this on my laptop while my wife drives us to my folks' place for dinner, so I've made some time. Here we go...



We're going to start the photographic tour in the basement. My office is shown above. It's rather chaotic at the moment because we don't have enough shelving for all the hardware & software I own. All the furniture except the chair was purchased at Ikea. I want to add more shelving units, but as is typical for the Ikea in our area, they were out of stock when we went back a couple of weeks ago. Please excuse me while I rant about Ikea for a moment...

We really like the European look of Ikea furniture, so it's no surprise that Ashley and I decorated 95% of our house with Ikea products. Yet as much as we enjoy how it looks, getting it is another matter. In January of this year, armed with the new 2002 Ikea catalog, we set out to plan our interior. We picked our furniture, only to go down to the store and discover that several items we chose were discontinued. What? How can a store discontinue items from their NEW catalog? We were looking for coffee tables, display cabinets, and a few other items - only to be told by Ikea that the product lines were either discontinued or they would take six months before they would be released again (something about them changing paint?). At any rate, as much as I like Ikea products, trying to get everything we wanted was a frustrating experience.



This is what our walk-out basement looks like from the inside. We opted to get blinds from Affordable Decorating, a local Calgary company, that would block 99% of the sunlight.



Chaos unleashed! My home office from the condo (our previous residence) had a massive custom-designed closet that stored a lot of equipment. I have no such closests in the basement, so we have a lot of work to do. It looks better now then when I took this picture - really! ;-)



This is the "spare bedroom" in the basement. We haven't had company yet. ;-) This is actually going to be our storage room. We'll probably throw some drywall up, but the floor won't be carpeted. You'll notice the computer sitting atop the rubber storage containers. My cable modem sits on top of that computer, which in turn hosts my multimedia files on 120 gigs of storage space. I love my digital audio!



We haven't finished the basement stairwell yet, but we thought we'd add a little culture to it. The artwork in the middle is Kanji created by my brother, Aaron Dunn, and the figures are martial artists in fighting poses that I bought in Calgary's China Town district.



Now we come to the "good looking" part of our house - the areas that we put a lot of effort into. Above is our living room - Ikea everywhere! We're really impressed with the hardwood floor, and the blend of colours we chose came together nicely. A set of Samurai swords adorns our mantle, a "flat" style stereo from Costco on the left, and not pictured on the right is a soothing stone waterfall. Our couches, chairs, and table are from Ikea.



Our kitchen area. The table and chairs are from Ikea, and the centrepiece was a wedding gift. The maroon colour looks excellent! We wanted to get a table big enough for both of our families, so with the wing inserted (not shown) the table seats twelve people. Our "bottom's up, top down" blinds were also provided by Affordable Decorating - we're really happy with them.



The famous stainless steel fridge! Both Ashley and myself adore the look of stainless steel, so we were practically giddy at the way our fridge looked in our kitchen. Someone generously gave us the retro-looking stainless steel toaster oven for a wedding gift.



Another shot of our living room.



The other half of our kitchen. We were shocked when the cabinets we liked weren't an extra! Everything with any real style was always an extra, so we were delighted when we didn't have to pay more to choose this design. We did, however, have to pay a few hundred bucks in other extras to get the cabinets lengthened for the nine foot ceilings. If we'd had an unlimited budget, we might have opted for a gas burner stove, but the black smooth top looks great, and we haven't quite evolved as chefs enough to warrant the gas top. Notice how high our microwave is above the stove? Despite our protests that it's wrong, Bay West assures us that it's to code and it needs to be that high (26" of clearance). Having ventured into friends' homes, we've noticed that all their microwaves are at an appropriate height...

Ashley and I are both tall, so we can reach it without a problem, but no woman of average height (5'5 or less) would be able to reach the top buttons on the microwave. This makes no sense to me - a building code that would force people to stand on a stool to use their microwave?



Our lovely island! It took Prestique Kitchens three attempts to get it right, but we're very pleased with how it turned out. The arc is finally correct! It was frustrating that it took them three months to get it right, even though Bay West apparently told them the arc was incorrect the first time they did it. Prestique went ahead anyway and tried to pass it off as correct, and Bay West didn't stop them - not exactly impressive.



A closer shot of our mantle and the stonework. Kanji symbols courtesy of Linens n' Things, swords courtesy of eBay.



Our front closet - nothing too exciting here. Adequete shelf space, although with no closet in the back room, I wish this was a little bigger. What's ironic is that it's already bigger than it was originally supposed to be - Bay West framed the bathroom incorrectly, which made it smaller, and resulted in the front closet being slightly bigger.



Our front entryway. Shoe rack by Ikea, floor mat by Linen's and Things.



Asian wall hangings from Pier 1 Imports.



Our back laundry room. The washer and dryer we purchased from Coast Appliances, and they're working out really nicely. Very quiet when operating. And no, we don't actually keep a monitor in our back room - it's from our church office and it's broken.





The hallway leading to our bonus room. The mighty Chewbacca looms off in the distance.



Our bonus room entertainment system, with Han Solo standing guard. Thank goodness my wife shares my sci-fi passion and she let me keep my cool stuff in this room. ;-) Media rack on the right courtesy of Boltz-USA.



Our well-worn leather couch which we brought from the condo and Ikea bookshelves in the background. Despite all the frustrations we've had with Ikea discontinuing certain pieces of furniture we wanted, these shelves and the rest of our decor really turned out exactly how we wanted it to. Lots of books! Every single book we own, short of the few we have in our piles of "to be read" are housed in these bookcases. Thankfully Ikea provides wall anchors with all their shelving units - the cases kept falling over with the weight of the doors! All is well now though - between the anchors and the heavy books, everything looks great.



These are dragons from a Franklin Mint collection that I own. They adorn the bonus room and look great! We're looking to get some backlights to mount inside each shelf to light up the dragons. Because the unit is black, when the blind is closed, the room gets quite dark and the dragons become invisible! Kind of tragic considering how beautiful they are.



Main bathroom upstairs. We were shocked to recieve such a cool shower curtain for a wedding gift. :-) Most of our "thematic" house decorations were hand-picked by us, but whoever bought this for us sure knew us well enough to pick something to match perfectly!



Pictured above is Ashley's office - I'm jealous of how quiet her Dell computer is! :-)

(Ashley now takes over writing the rest of this entry). Jason gave me the computer as a Christmas present. What a sweetheart! I still have some organizing to do in my office, but mostly just going through boxes and figuring out what can go in Jason's parents' garage sale two weekends from now. My mom and dad gave me my sewing maching on the day Jason and I got married. I still haven't used it, but my sister has promised to help me get started this summer.



Master bedroom with ultra-plush king-size bed that we nearly have to use a step stool to get onto! We decided to go all out and get a king size when we moved. Our old bed is in the spare room. The headboard and footboard match our decor as well. We've been really blessed during this building process in terms of meeting our decorating goals.



Here is our ensuite with walk-in closet. A standup shower on the left and the closet on the right. Between the two of us, we didn't have any trouble filling our closet with clothes!



This is our wonderful jacuzzi tub. As you may recall from Jason's last post, we've been having trouble with the water heater, and have to carefully monitor the water when we fill the tub up, otherwise it ends up freezing cold and ruins the bath. But, that aside, we love our tub. It's spacious and has six jets, three on either side. Having the block glass window beside it really adds a lot to the bathroom and the tub because we get more natural light.



Here we have our counter and medicine cabinet. We love our stainless steel sinks and our space-aged taps! (Poke-Moen!) As you've no doubt noticed, we went with an Asian decor, and have been fortunate enough to find a lot of matching accent pieces, like our kleenex box covers, toothpaste cup, soap dispenser and many other little knick knacks (talk about price gouging though - I'm still in shock we paid $40 CND for a kleenex box cover!)



Ah, the infamous main floor half bath. Quite some time ago, we posted about a building error made by Bay West in that they framed on the inside of the marks rather than the outside when building this bathroom, thus making it six inches too small. The round sink you've seen in all the other bathrooms was supposed to go in this one as well, but due to the smaller bathroom, we had to wait for a good month after moving in to get this smaller, airplane sized sink. (Personally, I think it looks like a hospital bedpan. - Jason) It's still fun though. Half baths are the ones you're supposed to have fun with anyway!

That's it for the photos - we hope you've enjoyed them! If you'd like to see pictures of anything else, or if you have any questions for us, please use the email link in the upper-right corner of the page. Thanks for visiting and reading about our new home!