In each of the four houses we've owned and lived in over the 60-year-time-frame of our marriage, my husband has left his individual mark, reflecting his very particular aesthetic. From our early 20s in the first modest semi-detached bungalow we lived in to the current house that is our home, and which incidentally is the house that we've lived in the longest, each of these places bore the reflection of my husband's tastes. And his ability to transform what they were -- bare husks of potential, into places that pleased us -- grew as his experience with first one then another gave him the opportunity to hone his skills and advance his more ambitious undertakings.

This is the house that reflects far more emphatically what those visions and his skills could accomplish. From the immense job of excavating by shovel a deep and wide and elongated area at the front of the house to expand gardens with the hardscape infrastructure of brick-laid and stone-lined patios and walkways incorporating gardens over a period of months one memorable spring, to his lining a second-story room openly overlooking the two-story-height foyer with native British Columbia lodge-pole pine and shelving for our own personal library, to transforming the height and breadth of most of the large windows of the house to stained-glass landscapes.

About fifteen years ago, when we'd lived in the house for a decade, he decided to tackle the kitchen, to rip out the existing floor tiles and replace them with ceramic tiles. That plan was expanded, just like most things my husband initially decides to do, to do the same with the laundry room, the hall between it, the kitchen and the powder room, and to include the powder room too in his plans. From deciding to replace the floor, to deconstructing the countertops in kitchen and powder room and deciding as well to include the breakfast room, re-building the countertops and tiling them too, and then tiling halfway up the walls in the powder room, the laundry room, the hallway, and the entire walls in the breakfast room, my husband had his work cut out for him for several years. But by then he was retired, and looking forward to the challenge.

He had started out his retirement years with a project to embark on a devotion to painting; for years he had dabbled in sketches, watercolours, oil paintings, and this new leisure time gave him the opportunity to express himself on canvass. And for the first several years he devoted himself to producing oil paintings, with credible and appreciated results. He veered off into designing stained-glass windows, and then producing those windows and then began building doors and building stained glass into the doors for various rooms of the house. Never a dull moment in this house.

When he finished replacing the carpeting in the upstairs hallways and rooms of the house with hardwood flooring, he looked at the bathrooms and decided they would be next. It was engaging entertainment shopping around for various kinds of tiles, ceramic and marble. And we chose a grey-and-pink-veined white marble tile for the bathroom off our bedroom, and my husband set to work in there as yet another project in the manner that kept occurring to him over the years. While he was preparing the floor, he decided the countertop also needed replacement, so ripped it out and rebuilt it, and the same with the tub surround. Then in the process of laying tile, he thought it would be a good idea to do all the walls, as well. We were extremely pleased with the results. And now that we've lived with them for the past fifteen years after completion of the job, we remain pleased.