Escape from the Cabin - An Alberta Staycation

 

As you may know if you’ve read my blog post “Escape to the Cabin” Rose and I are fortunate enough to have a place out in the country to escape the city during covid. Over the last two summers we have spent a lot of time exploring the little towns and attractions around the area near Bashaw Alberta. This post is about the roving we’ve done and some of the local gems we’ve discovered.

We love our little 10 acres of paradise but there’s only so much reading and relaxing and tinkering you can do so we’ve started to develop a routine. When we get out there on Wednesday or Thursday afternoon, we settle in and plan our “Escape FROM the Cabin” for Friday. Sometimes it’s just our local little town of Bashaw but usually it’s a little farther afield.
Bashaw is just a 10 minute drive and we’ve been there many, many times over the years and we try to shop there as much as possible to support the local businesses.

Bashaw Rodeo Chuckwagon Races

The Bashaw Museum

The Bashaw Canada Day Parade

It’s a little strange in a town of 830 people to have 2 liquor stores and 2 grocery stores and at least 4 restaurants but that’s what Bashaw boasts. There’s also a butcher shop, a hardware store, a building supply store, a drug store, a gas station and many other small businesses.

This is not the city though! You better watch the posted hours if you want the store to be open and even then, with one restaurant in particular, it’s still a crap shoot. I get it though, for a small family run business it’s important to draw a line and declare that family comes first. We love this one restaurant called “The Noble Fox” (weird name for a Mexican Restaurant) and we often take our visitors there for some great food (when it’s open).

Delicious burger at the Noble Fox

Steak Carnitas at the Noble Fox

On one memorable occasion Rose and I attended a dance at the Majestic Theatre in Bashaw and had a great time sitting and chatting with some locals between dances. Before covid came along we enjoyed the Bashaw Rodeo and chuck wagon races on one nice August afternoon and hopefully we’ll get another chance to do it again.

Bashaw Rodeo Mini Chuckwagon Races

Bashaw is so close though and we’re there so often that it’s not really a special outing for us anymore, more of a quick trip to the store for something we need. These days when we want to enjoy a special day in the country we are likely to venture into the bustling town of Lacombe. 

It’s a little weird to be saying this because I’m sure that Lacombe has lots more to offer, but for us the biggest draws are a thrift store and the best darn donuts I’ve ever eaten at a place called Toller’s Bistro. I may not know much, but I know a great donut when I bite into one and yowza, these donuts are da bomb!

The Worlds Best Donut!

Before I tried their donuts the best donut like thing that I ever tasted was probably the cronuts we tried in Montreal in 2017, but now there’s a new champ! Rose likes the lemon poppy seed donuts but I’m a chocolate man and their Skor flavoured donuts are my favourite for sure.

I’m kind of glad that for us the cabin is a three season affair and from November until April I can wean myself off of these amazing pastries of fluffy, sugary, bliss.

This past year as we contemplated closing up the cabin, we determined that it was absolutely necessary to make a last stop in Lacombe to pick up a dozen donuts to freeze and ration out over the long cold winter. Only this (or something tasty like it) makes it possible to survive an Alberta winter!

Of course there are a couple of other things that we love about Lacombe, they have a really big farmers market on Fridays with food trucks and baked goods and all sorts of yummies. Plus they have at least one really good restaurant called the Cilantro & Chive, yum!

We also love the thrift store because they have a lot of DVDs for sale and they only cost $.50 each! It feels like such a bargain (start the car!) toting 15 0r 20 DVDs back to the cabin along with a bunch of kids books for Junie and paying only $10 or so.

We both love a bargain and with no TV at the cabin we always need a fresh supply of viewing and reading material. We took some friends and our adult kids to Lacombe on a couple of occasions last summer and I don’t think they appreciated the thrift store as much as we did, although when we took them for donuts they sure perked up!

Not far from Lacombe is the Ellis Bird Farm and at least a couple of times a year we like to go there and wander around through the flower gardens, woods and trails watching the hundreds of birds that nest there. This past summer we took Junie and Kait for the first time and had lots of fun down at the pond trying to grab up some pond life in the nets they provided. Next year when she’s three, she’ll be able to do more activities and we can’t wait to take her back.

My Ellis Bird Farm Pond Photo-393,000 views on Google Maps!

Kait & Junie trying to catch a pollywog

In our travels we kept seeing a sign for the town of Stettler and since it was only about 40 minutes away from the cabin we figured we’d give it a try one Friday afternoon. Sorry Stettler, but we gave it a shot and your thrift store was closed “because of covid” and the only donut shop besides Tim Hortons that we could find totally sucked! I don’t doubt that there is more to recommend the town but for us it was a bust except for the cool old sign shown below.

Cool old sign in Stettler

On the other hand we loved the much smaller town of Alix where my grandparents had a house when I was growing up. It was fun to drive around the town and search for the old house and it was even more fun when we found it! I have many fond memories from my childhood of spending time there with my Dad’s mom & dad, Cecil & Lois Petry.
My grandfather Cecil worked at the local “creamery” in Alix until he retired and eventually passed away sometime around 1975.

The house had one of those attics with the little "secret passage" running beside the eaves and us kids loved to creep from one bedroom to the other, trying not to fall through the weird, vermiculite insulation. Such fun with the cousins munching grandma's home made cake donuts (I'm sensing a theme here) and playing in the attic bedrooms.

The town is unrecognizable now but lakes don’t move (much) and their house was adjacent to the North side of the Alix lake and that made it a lot easier to find. We discovered that today Alix has a great little antique store and lots of other shops and a few restaurants that we will have to try out the next time we are there.

Another fun little place that we like to go is “Gracie D’s” antiques and collectibles in the tiny little town of Mirror. This store almost seems to be bigger than the whole rest of the town combined! There are 15-20 small buildings in an enclosed yard and one main building and everything is just stuffed full of, well, stuff.

Much, much stuff. There’s Big stuff, small stuff, old stuff, very old stuff and shiny or rusty stuff. Lots of happy rummaging material here!

Gracie D's yard decorated with old truck & Flowers

Old Volkswagen Beetle at Gracie D's 

There’s one other town nearby that we often spend time in and that’s Camrose, a 30 minute drive from the cabin. We came so close to moving to Camrose a few years ago and Rose made me drive there to look at houses many, many times that summer. But along came our granddaughter Junie and that was, as they say, that.

The shopping and restaurants in Camrose are great and there isn’t much that you can’t get there, we love Mirror Lake and the path that goes all the way around it and we like to stop for an ice cream cone and then take a nice walk around the lake.

We’ve really missed the “Jaywalkers Jamboree” that takes place during June in Camrose. It’s basically a small town version of whatever they’re now calling Edmonton’s Klondike Days/Edmonton Exhibition/K Days, but with free parking and no entrance charge because it takes place right on the downtown streets.

Fun on the Carousel - Jaywalkers Jamboree

Games & Prizes

We find that there is always something to see in Alberta’s small towns and we really enjoy wandering around checking them out when we’re a little bored and trying to “Escape from the Cabin”. Christmas is now over and the days are starting to get longer, oh so slowly, so it won’t be long until we’re again anxiously anticipating spring once again. We just have to get through January and February and March, nothing to it!

Renos with Rosie - The Kitchen Contention - Part 1

 

I protested vehemently and I argued eloquently. 

I even resorted to raising my voice and stomping my foot in protest. But in the end, somehow, through some kind of feminine wiles that I fail to understand, I agreed to renovate the kitchen.

Not that it didn't need it because oh boy, it realllllly needed it!

My argument was more along the lines of, "with the state of the world right now extra money might be better spent on a root/bomb cellar or any number of prepper supplies like maybe respirators or batteries and I don't know, copious amounts of toilet paper!"

When that didn't work I mentioned that I had spent the entire previous winter doing minor renovations of one sort or another and "I am just really exhausted! I'm supposed to be retired!" And finally, the real kicker argument, "I don't wanna!"

But as usual I was eventually overruled and after a lot of Pinterest consultations and discussion between Rose, our adult daughters, April, Kait and myself; our design began to take shape and plans were made.

Little did I know that Rose’s plans and what I thought were our plans did not jive at all! We were supposed to go to BC to visit her ailing father and other family and friends and as cabin season was coming to an end we were really busy there and in our own yard and there was definitely no time to begin renovations.

 

So of course that’s exactly what Rose proposed that we do, she wanted me to build a paint booth in the back yard and begin painting all of the kitchen cabinets before winter!

My usual knee-jerk (or just jerk if you prefer) reaction is to say “NO, it can’t be done! It’s impossible!” And of course that’s what happened, exactly as my clever wife had planned. Perhaps she knows me too well, or I don’t know her well enough because I fell for it again.

Once she had elicited my expected reaction to her outrageous painting proposal, she quickly backed away from the ruse and deftly slipped in a new more reasonable idea that I found infinitely more doable, and so begins our kitchen renovation story.

If you've ever done much in the way of renovating you understand the domino effect that determines the order in which you can proceed. For us it is the extreme lack of storage space that we had to factor into our plans as we thought about the order that things had to be done.

This is where we are going

This is where we started

We decided that step one was to remove our tiny pantry cabinet in the kitchen and replace it with two Ikea "Pax" wardrobe cabinets that we could stuff full of all of the displaced kitchen items that we would end up with when we pulled down one of our upper cabinets and did away with all of the countertop clutter.

These Pax things are huge and when you install 3 drawers and 4 shelves inside each one they are amazingly spacious and practical as a kitchen pantry.

One issue with them for us is the very weak shelves that are only supported on the sides and not the back. But with my amazing MacGyver skills I designed a hack that should make these shelves able to survive unbowed for years. I cut 2x2 pieces to fit under the shelves along the back, painted them white and put screws into them through the sides of the pantry. Mic drop!

Supports for the Pax Pantry shelves

Ikea "Pax" Pantry

Right now getting some products at Ikea is a challenge and it took over a month to get the shelves in and I ended up cutting down a full sized shelf to make a microwave shelf above our "coffee bar".

 

The coffee bar is our favourite part of the pantry setup right now with the little led strip mounted on the underside of the shelf above it illuminating the coffee area nicely. For once, everything related to coffee and tea is located together in one place! We love it.

The Coffee Bar

While we waited for the Ikea shelves to arrive we started on the countertops and removing one of the upper cabinets beside the window so we could tile the entire wall and install floating shelves.

We decided on rubber wood, butcher block countertops from Lowes and we picked up 3 of them on sale for $129 each. As I wheeled them out I was tempted to yell “start the car” like the Ikea commercial. Next I got started ripping out the old counters so we could get it all done while the weather held. Since I have no garage, I do most of my cutting outside and we were in a race against the winter snows.

Ripping out the old counter

The new counter installed

The weird hole I had to make for the sink

The countertops cut fairly easily and since we were butting them up against each other and not trying to do 45 degree angles or anything it went very quickly. The biggest job was cutting out the hole and fitting the used white cast iron sink that Rose had found at the Re-Store. 

After insisting that we store that old sink in the basement for at least 7 years, she finally found a use for the thing. It is a weird size that just barely fit into the existing sink base unit but now it looks great! 

Rose's salvage sink $30

As I got the counters all in and fastened down I was standing around admiring how great they looked and thinking, "there, that's done, on to the next step." Of course that's  when my lovely wife dropped the bombshell that she now wanted to get rid of the lazy Susan unit in the corner cabinet and replace it with some slide out pot racks.

I may have reacted shall we say "strongly",  since I had mentioned it earlier when the counters were off and was assured that no, we weren’t going to be ripping it out. “Are you sure dear?”  I asked, “because now would be the time to do it while the counters are off.”

But "nooooooo" I was told, until I was all finished installing the counters and then it magically changed to "YES", I should have known! 

As it turned out it wasn’t too difficult to take out with a little help from my favourite power tool, my sawzall, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, that thing is amazing at demolishing stuff. 

Removing the Lazy Susan

The biggest problem was that once I cut a hole in the side of the cabinet and Junie our granddaughter learned she could climb inside and make a fort in there, I was lucky to get it done without breaking her little heart. She’s getting used to renovations though and seems to just roll with it, enjoying each phase of the process.

Junie in her temporary "fort"

Speaking of Junie, one day after we looked after her during the renovation and she was “helping me” all day she went home and was busy moving stuff around and when her mom asked her what she was doing her response was. “I'm the papa, making everything nice". She was apparently, “remodelling.” What a sweetie!

The pot rack drawers turned out great and after I was finished I noticed that there was about 6 extra inches of clearance so I made a nice little spice drawer as well. I’m particularly proud of the drawer as I made it for about $10 and it works great.

The new spice drawer

And the pot racks

Next we removed one of the upper cabinets, April helped me replace the kitchen window, (she now loves the Sawzall almost as much as I do) and we completely tiled the wall around the window right to the ceiling. 

Next I installed 2 floating shelves that I made myself from the same rubberwood countertops that I used for the counters and if that wasn’t enough, I boxed in the extra space above the cabinet so it goes right to the ceiling now.

April helps me tile the backsplash

It's coming along-holes are for the floating shelf pins

Rose likes to "inflict" I mean "show me" various blogs with ideas for doing some similar renos and sometimes they are even helpful. One of them was about installing floating shelves and since they seemed workable, I shamelessly used their ideas- with a little tweaking of course. 

Getting ready for the floating shelves

I drilled holes in the studs about 3 inches deep and threaded 5/8th rods into the holes and then drilled slightly larger, matching holes into the shelves and pushed the shelves on and just like that, floating shelves. Actually that all involved about 6 hours of work and cost more than commercially available shelves but hey, it’s “custom”. 

The partly finished kitchen

All that’s left to do on that wall is a little more tile, a crown molding along the top of the cabinets at the ceiling and to paint all of the kitchen cabinets. In part 2 of this little renovation blog we will be doing all of that plus building a new custom hood vent. That should be fun! Not!

So far it’s been going great and we both love the renos that we’ve completed. We are taking a much deserved Christmas break and then we get back at it in January. We’ve got a little bit of time before cabin season starts again in April and this year I’m determined not to miss a minute of it so this renovation has got to be done before then!