Chez Wilson

NOTE:  I apologize for the way this blog has published itself.  I do not want to remove any pics due to the nature of this post, and all the editing of lines and pictures seems to create more problems.  I am sure you will concern yourselves more with the actual words and pics than their positioning, but I wanted to mention that Blogger seems to have a mind of its own today.

CHEZ WILSON

It has occurred to me that I have not given you a tour of our house, and I can't believe I forgot about it!  When I mentioned that to the kids, they said, "Just wait before you take pictures of our rooms!" and they scrambled off (voluntarily I might add) to clean them before I snapped a pic to preserve for all posterity and to present to our friends and family.  Ha!  I should have tried that earlier!

The first thing about our house that we love is that it is a three-bedroom house and NOT a two-bedroom apartment.  Everything has its place and everything in its place, which was definitely not the case in London.  Our place was always cramped and cluttered because we could not fit our stuff into such small, close quarters.  When it was always cluttered, it becomes a struggle just to keep things organized...and cleaning like dusting and windows, etc. happen far less frequently because it's exhausting just to organize.  Now, however, since everything has a place to be stored, it is absolutely lovely to pull out the dust rags and the glass cleaner, although it does ice if you spray it on ultra cold windows!  You have to spray the cleaner on the rag first, and then wipe.  A friendly tip from the Wilsons of the North!

Some of you who have visited with us via Skype or Facetime have had the grand tour already, but I am sure you will enjoy looking at these pics of our house nonetheless.  It sure was fun to take them knowing I would be posting them for all to see what a northern house looks like.   There are families two to three times larger than us who live in houses half the size, although this house is small compared to a typical 3-4 bedrom house in Southern Ontario, mainly because it doesn't have a basement, and that we have one common area, rather than a living room and a family/TV room.  We are, however, used to that since we all used to pile one upon each other in the living room in our apartment!

We shall begin with the deck.  Every house in Tuk, and in fact throughout any place where there is permafrost has some sort of deck leading to the front door because the house is built on pilings.  Some decks are just a few steps, and then there is ours, which could hold a little gathering of friends come spring if the bugs aren't too bad. To the left of the picture are the stairs leading down to our driveway, but below the railings of the deck the driveway extends to the back of the property to the back entrance to the house.

Every house must have a front entrance, and up here every house in fact, enters into what we affectionately call a mudroom.  This is the place where you come stumbling in from the blustery wind and cold temporarily blinded from the glasses fogging.  Anybody who has to put on snow pants, parkas, boots, hats, scarves, as well as gloves/mittens and any other items deemed necessary to keep one warm in polar temperatures needs not only a room in which to dress and undress, but also a complete room dedicated to the storage of said items.  A closet just will not do when you have five people (and remember what I said about three kids being a small sized family for up here) who all have at least one set of what I just described. It is especially difficult when we all arrive home at once, and are unloading into the various storage bins I have put into place for organizational purposes, although some members of our family who shall go nameless (Patrick and Charlotte) think that the kitchen is a nice spot for their hats and mittens.  This is an ongoing thing - trying to teach good habits now that everything has a place. The kids still say, "Oh yeah!  I can put that away now!".  Our front entrance is the door you can see to the right of the house.  We keep the mudroom door closed unless we are expecting visitors or somebody home soon to heat it up extra well.  There is some heat to it so our feet don't freeze in cold boots, but not as much as throughout our house. We have to keep the door to the mudroom closed because the cold air seeps in through the front door, and we freeze!!

Our comfortable kitchen

When you enter our house from the mudroom, you spill out into the kitchen by the refrigerator.  Most houses do not have a dishwasher, so the fact that we have a portable one is pretty nifty.  We are grateful for it, too!  For those of you who really know us, the fridge magnets are part of our Wilson Family signature.  We have been buying magnets during our adventures since before James was born, and if you go somewhere, you have probably received a request from us to bring us back a magnet. When my mom and dad got married, they received a bell with a wall mount.  My mom has always had it mounted in the kitchen and when she was ready to call us to dinner, she'd ring the bell.  After a move, my mom always felt that she wasn't 'home' until her dinner bell was mounted in the kitchen.  Well, for the five of us, we aren't home until our fridge magnets are displayed.  The day the kids came home from school and saw the magnets they all commented "Good.  We're home now." There is not a tonne of cupboard or counter space in this kitchen, but we make do.  I store a lot of our overflow in the back room.  The eating area accommodates all of us quite nicely.  The table and chair set came with the house. Since we have a few laptops laying around and the kitchen table is where they tend to accumulate, I put a little table in the corner, and when the laptops aren't in use, they are stored there.

The wood stove

Our living room is roomy and spacious. We have our orange walls, which to some people are a curiosity, but when you live in darkness for much of the time, these orange walls are cheerful and cozy, and match well with our olive coloured furniture. These pics were taken shortly after our flood while the living room floor was pulled up.  It has since been replaced.  We are lucky enough to have a wood-burning stove, and use it half-heartedly.  Wood up here is very expensive, and the wood that was already here for us was terrible and not split to the dynamics of our wood stove.  Greg and I are not exactly woodsmen ourselves so this means getting wood split for us that meets the dimensions of our wood stove, and that is even more money. Now that we are in the dregs of winter, our heating bills are not actually that bad, so we keep wood around in case we lose power, but that's all.

The big white thing is our water tank, which
accepts daily water delivery.

Hurray for laundry!!

The door to the right of the wood stove is our utility room.  This (to the right) is what you see when you enter the laundry room, but if you look behind the door you see this (see above, left).  The humungous white tank houses our water.  It is about 5.5 feet tall, 6 feet long and 5.5 feet wide. This is our water tank, which accepts our daily water delivery. You can see the pipes in the background on the right which lead to the hose outside.  Everyday, the water truck makes its daily delivery, pulling up outside the back of the house, and then you can hear the water hose being attached, and finally, the rush of water filling the tank.  We have to budget our water in a sense.  Since there are five of us needing to shower and/or bathe, dishes to be washed, toilets to be flushed, a dishwasher to run, hands to clean, and of course the never ending laundry pile, we have to keep track of who and what is using water and why.  We often wake up in the  morning and throw as many people as possible into the shower so that way we use up our water from the day before and will have a full tank with which to do laundry.  This means running the dishwasher often late at night just before we go to bed, or waiting until we hear the delivery truck pull up and get it going then.  We learned a few things the hard way, but we're pretty good at budgeting now. There is also our heat pump and hot water heater, which send the hot water through our baseboard heaters to heat the house.


Anyway, if you stand facing the utility room door and turn toward your right, you will find find a hallway with a step up.  The door on the left is THE ONE bathroom in the house.  We have had to develop some flexible rules about bathroom usage at our house, and here they are for your reading pleasure:

The one and only!

1.  Never lock the bathroom door.  Ever.  Too many of us need to use the bathroom at one time or in an emergency to allow for privacy.  Sorry.
2.  If you are in the shower, the toilet is free to use if the toilet user is unable to hold it.
3.  Towelling dry after a shower occurs behind the shower curtain in the tub so if somebody has to go while you are in there, it can happen.
4. Toothbrushing is not a private thing, nor is make up and brushing/blowing dry hair.
5.  Be kind about how many Wilsons can fit in a bathroom, because sometimes that happens, especially with toothbrushing.
6.  Smells happen.  Get used to it.
7.  Shower on your assigned day.  Kids shower at night and grown ups have the option to shower at night or in the morning.  If you are going to shower in the morning, say something to the other adult(s) in the house the night before to plan ahead. This applies on weekdays mostly.

Since we have figured out these rules, life with one bathroom works well. Oh yeah, and the bright red walls sure do wake you up in the morning.  I tend not to turn on the light for trips to the loo in the night due to the vibrant colour.

James on the right...

Where you have to step up just before going down the hall to the bathroom, you have to step down just before entering the boys' room.  This funny little step raises the bathroom up which allows for all the pipes and plumbing to be under the floor (rather than underground due to the permafrost and extremely cold temperatures) with the grey water pipe running outside the side of the house to an outdoor holding tank.  There is another truck that comes around daily to eliminate this waste.  We refer to it as the sewage truck, but we are the only ones who use this phrase in reference to the truck.  Everybody else Tuk born and bred, plus those who have been around a while refer to it simply as the s*@t truck.  Sometimes when the sewage truck is draining the tank, the pipes are accidentally bled dry, which means the toilet water gets sucked out of the toilet and all your pipes are empty.  What happens swiftly afterward is something unique to Tuk, and that is the ungodly smell that begins to emanate from anything with a faucet.  I am sure you can image what it is. If we are home when the sewage truck arrives, we send somebody to the bathroom to watch the toilet water.  If it gets sucked out, we quickly flush the toilet and turn on the taps in the bathroom and kitchen as well as the tub.  I also turn the washer on for a minute too.  The problem is, if we are all out of the house, such as on days when we are all at the school, the odour hits you like a tonne of bricks upon walking in the mudroom door!  A few minutes with the taps running eliminates it, but it's still gross.  Luckily, this is not unique to us....it's a Life in the North thing.

At the end of the hallway is the boys' room.  Just before their door there are several shelves which are supposed to serve as a linen closet.  One interesting thing about this place is that there are no closet doors.  The mudroom has visible hooks and rods for hangers but no actual door, nor do any of the bedrooms or the linen closet.

...and Patrick on the left.

The boys share a room, as always.  They actually like sharing a room and have said that they almost need one another to fall asleep at night.  Here they are in their room, which they cleaned up just for you! Almost all of their bedroom furniture was provided, which is great because the boys used a bunk bed from Ikea before this.  They were getting to an age where bunk beds were too juvenile for them, and the Ikea bunk especially would not hold them for much longer.  Had they had sturdy, maple beds that stacked on top of each other, maybe, but since these were Ikea it was time to leave those behind in London.  Here is a pic of the boys' closet, and as you will see, there are no doors. I don't know if other houses are like that up here, but for us it is yet another Life in the North thing.

Door free

Once again, if you go back to our living room and stand facing the utility room there is a hallway to the right which leads to the bathroom and boys' room, but if you pass the wood stove (see pics above of the living room) there is a hallway which leads you down to Char's room and Greg's and my room.  At the end of the hallway there is a door, which leads to an uninsulated room with a freezer and an external door.  Since fire code states that every house must have two exits, this is it.  The external door does not have a lock, which means anything you put out there is up for grabs if somebody decided to help themselves.  We have never had a large freezer before, so we use it to some extent.  However, why plug it in and use it when you can just put the items you
want to keep frozen on some shelves we set up and then let good ol' Mother Nature do her thing?  We keep the door to the house at the end of the hallway locked.

The boys enjoying some time in their room

Anyway, when you are looking down the hallway, Char's room is on the right and Greg's and mine is on the left.  Char hit the jackpot when we arrived here.  The little girl who used to live in this room had parents who painted her room in pale pink and purple diamonds, with a clever use of painting tape.  This definitely adds to the charm of Char's room, although a lot of it she decorated herself with her art work from school as well as other items she has created in her spare time.

The pink light!

The room is quite long and spacious with the door in the middle of the interior wall.  When I look to the left, there is her bedroom (and the cool pink light she insisted on turning on so you can enjoy its pinkness) and to the right you see the dresser, her art desk and to the far right...her closet sans doors.  Any of you who know and love our Charlotte will remember that one of our 'fond' nicknames for her is Hurricane Charlotte since she is known for leaving a trail of destruction behind her wherever she goes.  This is improving a bit with age, but we are most grateful that she now has a spot of her own in which to dump, and every other weekend,
she is responsible for the organizing and cleaning of her room.

Charlotte's art desk and dresser

As for our room, it is big enough to house our bed, which is king-sized to accommodate two Extra-Large Wilsons and a pipsqueak who often cuddles with us.  While it is not a designer room, it is warm and serves its purpose.  One day in the house of my dreams, my bedroom will be an oasis where I can retreat, complete with an enormous bathtub and room for a TV and sitting area, but for now...I'm happy to have a bed and dresser in a room with a closet, doors or not.




Well, there you have it, folks.  Our happy home in the North.  It houses us quite contentedly and has become our own refuge.  A calm, safe and loving environment in which we laugh, cry play and pray. This is our own little piece of the North, complete with an ocean view - the Arctic Ocean that is! While we understand that visitors will be few and far between, we promise that anybody who makes the two day plane ride to experience life in Tuktoyaktuk, Northwest Territories will receive a plate of chocolate chip cookies and some hot chocolate with marshmallows.

Don't forget your longjohns!