poplar road

Our latest reno marathon is over for the week. The end result of it won't show up in any of the following photos, though: cool air. Just in time for this heat wave, we've got air conditioning. Thank you, Jason!! Only half the house is done – two out of our four thermostat-controlled zones – the great room, kitchen and office upstairs, and the main area of the basement. The bedroom was still overly warm last night at about 26 degrees, but with the AC on for several hours this evening it should be cooler all over tonight. There is still lots of work to be done to hook up ducting to the remaining zones, finish replacing the plumbing, and complete the wiring. But the amount of work completed since Friday morning was incredible. Here are the highlights.

Since Chris came up to do the gas-fitting on the 9th, things have hardly slowed down around here. Richard continued with plumbing so that we'd have hot water for showers, laundry, and the dishwasher, which we had to time around power outages as Kevin, our electrician, worked four mornings last week on the electrical upgrade. Our neighbour with the backhoe came by to dig a trench through my flower beds for the electrical grounding plates, and Richard took the day off work on Friday to get a head start before Jason arrived for the weekend's heat pump installation.

In addition to Kevin, at work on the new panel and the mast in my office, and me hammering away in the ensuite bathroom on the last of the demolition, we had Darryl, concrete repair expert, filling in the fissures in our foundation in the basement and at the front steps. The filler stank and I apparently made more of a racket than the three guys combined, but Richard, Kevin and Darryl worked away in the basement all morning. As Kevin removed old aluminum wiring, Richard drilled holes in the joists for the new copper wiring. (The old stuff was often looped underneath and sometimes stapled, sometimes not, with the usual complement of hidden junction boxes and dead end wires capped with tape.) He also drilled through the foundation for wiring and ducting to reach the heat pump.

Then when the guys finished up around lunchtime, Richard started pulling out the remaining ducting. He also found time to drive into town to get more parts, and a roast for Saturday night's dinner with Jason and the Adies. We brought in all the new ducting, heat pump, and furnace components, and then loaded the truck full for a trip to the dump the next morning. Jason arrived late Friday evening. Once they started talking excitedly about the job ahead, I worried the were going to start work on the spot, but after such a long day for both of them they were ready for bed. They certainly burned the midnight oil the rest of the weekend, though!

Saturday morning began early. Jason and Richard started setting up the furnace and heat pump in what will be the mechanical room, behind the downstairs bathroom. But when I got back from a half hour run to the transfer station at noon, they sent me out the door again, already short on parts. We were expecting the Adies to arrive early in the afternoon, so I raced into town and back with a front seat full of sheet metal. I came home to find one of my lilacs resting limply in the dirt, and in its place, the exterior half of our new heat pump. I found a new spot to re-plant the lilac. No sign of Kahlyn, Bob, and Anika, which gave me ample time to sweep up the huge amount of dirt these construction zones create throughout the house. (Earlier in the week I toyed with the idea of mopping the floor. Not worth the trouble given the matter of minutes it takes to get dirty again!) Richard took a break to get the roast on the rotisserie, and I began preparing vegetables for dinner. The Adies arrived and got the tour, just as things began to look dramatically different in the basement.

We had a great dinner and stayed up quite late talking. As we were sitting around with my magazine images and colour swatches, Richard came up with a great solution for the lack of natural light in our main bathroom. (More on the bathrooms another time.) And we decided a tissue box I found at the Safety Mart was the perfect colour scheme. We might have put ourselves to sleep at that point, had a mouse not darted out from under the couch near Bob's feet. It ran into my office, looking for a way out, but the escape routes via the old ducting were all gone, and the hole in the foundation that let the mice in and out via the front door had been filled on Friday. I briefly felt sorry for it, but ran to fetch the poison anyway as Richard found the hole in the wall where it had squeezed through. He put the poison in and blocked off the hole with plywood. Tonight it sounded like it might have got its revenge for being trapped in the wall, chewing on the new wiring for the thermostat above its hiding place. The best part of this latest reno might be the gains against both the mice and the mosquitoes as the house becomes less inviting for them. It's definitely getting more comfortable for us.

On Sunday as I visited with the Adies - during which Anika got sneezed on by one of the llamas, and Kahlyn uncovered cherry tomato plants growing in our courtyard - Jason and Richard got the ducting in and vents cut out for the living room and office, and determined which other vents needed to be added around the house. The four different zones allow us to set separate temperatures in the downstairs main area, guest suite, upstairs bedrooms and baths, and the office and great room. Jason will need to come back to set the zoning for the remaining two areas, but since only the one small upstairs bedroom is in daily use right now, it can wait. And the furnace isn't working yet for heat, but with sunny weather finally, in the 30s all week, all we care about is the AC.

The last thing the guys did was pull the large vent out of the wall between the existing master bedroom and the spare room. (The material looks brand new, so we'll probably sell it. That's the first image in this post.) With this space freed up, our plans to open up the two rooms and bump out the bathroom walls into the existing master bedroom can go ahead when the new bathroom fixtures arrive. The electrical upgrade is just about done after Kevin installed the new meter base and mast today. Richard spent his third day off wiring new outlets and lights in the basement to replace the aluminum wiring removed over the weekend. (I spent most of the day gardening. Am avoiding the next trip to the dump with all the master bedroom's drywall.) It's all coming together. My office is in chaos thanks to the electrical work, which is making my job-hunting tasks a little more of a hassle, but I look forward to sealing up that wall soon and finishing the paint and molding properly so we can get on with using this space to the fullest. Like bringing in Richard's desk. With all the technical specs, manuals, plans, receipts, contacts and doodles he's been accummulating, using the kitchen as his office space doesn't cut it any more.

It's been overwhelming the past two weeks, but we're making progress. And it's been great to see Chris and Jason and all our other visitors, who keep us excited about what we're doing here. Thanks again for all your help.

It's a good thing we spent the first five days of July relaxing and recharging our batteries, because since we got home a week ago it's been full steam ahead. Chris came up over the weekend to do the gas-fitting for us, and while that was underway, Richard got most of the plumbing done as well as removing most of the old ducting. Rob stopped in on his way east and joined us for a rotisserie roast Saturday night and breakfast Sunday morning, then he went on his way and the guys went back to work. I continued with my drywall demolition in the upstairs master bedroom Saturday, but a cold has slowed me down a bit, so I left the last hard-to-reach edges around the ceiling for another day (the ceiling itself has to come down soon, too). The transformation going on in the basement was rapid and gratifying, so each time I took a break I headed downstairs with the camera.

Because I took so many photos over the past week, I think I'm going to make this post more of a photo-gallery and keep the explanations to a minimum. So, here are Chris and Richard threading gas pipe in the yard, the scrap ducting behind them. The canopy is up over his threading machine because it is still raining daily here. Also below are shots of the new gas lines and the plumbing – including our Rinnai "instant-on" hot water heater, 2.5 gallon tank, filters, and hot and cold manifolds – in what will be a closet in the downstairs bathroom.

There are a few photos from the 7th as well, when we were tidying up around the house and enjoying being back at home. We visited with the neighbours, a group of us all gathered at the llama pen fence to watch Smoky's new baby, born at 2pm on Thursday. (The Barbados sheep also provided some unusual bedtime entertainment: on Friday night as we waited for Chris to arrive, Jonathan and Sandra roamed the neighbourhood with flashlights. Richard went out at midnight to help track down the flock, which was discovered missing when one of the visiting grandchildren realized she hadn't closed the front gate. We'll have to nickname her Bo Peep! The Barbies were found curled up on the next door lawn soon after.)

This week, our next door neighbours' son-in-law Kevin, an electrician, has been working on our electrical upgrade (which is why I'm so late getting this post done – we ripped out the corner wall in my office and it's a mess in here). We've also hired a neighbour with a backhoe to dig a 13 foot long trench from the foundation through my poppy field so we can lay the ground wire for the upgrade perpendicular to the house. (Bye bye, lilac.) Then Jason arrives on Friday with our heat pump. Hopefully he and Richard can install the heat pump components, ducts, and other equipment by the end of the weekend, and then maybe Richard will frame in the mechanical room and the plumbing closet. When the HVAC stuff is done, it's on to the master bedroom and bathrooms, starting with the new shower in the en suite (so we have something to bathe in once we rip out the old sea-foam-blue tub). To add to the excitement this weekend, Bob, Kahlyn, and little Anika are staying over Saturday night on their way to a local beach. Another full house and lots of work to be done. I won't be on the computer tomorrow or Friday, most likely, because Kevin will need to get at the main wiring in my office and shut the power off in here for a while, but I'm sure I'll have lots more photos to post on Monday! Playing House, Part VIII continues…

That's all I have time for, and I suppose it's not very self-explanatory, but you get the gist of what we're up to. After Jason and Richard get the heating done this weekend, I'll spend a bit more time describing the plans for our master bedroom and the two upstairs bathrooms. Richard has made some more changes that are going to work even better than the original plans. We were very lucky in the structure of the house that all the plumbing was centred in this one area - it made last weekend's plumbing job easier, and allows us to reorganize the bathroom spaces into two rooms that will work so much better than the existing layout with a minimum of actual piping changes. I'm looking forward to the fixture delivery (and moving on to things like tile and paint). I just hope we can get the fixture installations done as quickly as the work we've done so far! What a week. Wish us luck.

We've just come home from an extended long weekend at our friends' beachfront property near Port Townsend in Washington. This was our third time at the Lund's annual gathering to celebrate the Fourth of July, and as usual, it was a great mix of people, great food including a fresh seafood boil with local crab and clams, and lots of rest and relaxation. Just what we needed.

Richard and I started the weekend with a Canada Day quiz on Friday night, giving out packages of Canada-coloured Smarties as prizes. That spawned a funny conversation in which I sang the Smarties song - turns out they don't have chocolate covered Smarties in the States, their "smarties" are compressed sugar things. Our American friends get a lot of amusement out of Canadian jokes at our expense, so this was our way of educating them a little on this great land of ours. (Last year our response was to play the Song of 1812, which didn't go over well at all.) And we were very happy to see our friend Lisa, an ex-patriated Canadian who could translate for us. For example, as we were sharing the latest plans for our home reno, I got blank looks while explaining the changes to our "ensuite". Master bath, I was corrected. At one point I had enough of my badminton birdie landing "OOOT", and suggested we buy young Dallas a one-way ticket to backwoods Ontario so he could see how long he lasted teasing the Canadians who actually do talk like that. Hmph.

We all got sunburns in odd spots - tops of knees, noses, one foot - and spent equal amounts of time buried in sweatshirts and fleece blankets around the fire, but it was near-perfect weather for eating, gabbing, reading, badminton, sleeping, and eating some more. There's always great food at these weekends, since each couple is assigned a meal to orchestrate and each one lasts several hours it seems. We brought our chafing dishes and Richard's gigantic stock pots again this year and they were put to good use. I'm getting hungry just thinking about it. Ideas for next year include an Iron Chef weekend - all the guests supply the food and Richard and John, another capable and avid cook, will each do a dinner extravaganza. But they had so much fun making chowder together out of the leftover seafood boil that I think they'd rather cook together the whole weekend than make a competition out of it. And how could people so sleepily satiated from morning to night judge anything anyway? And it's hard to keep Richard out of a kitchen.

Many thanks to Tim and Debbie and family for hosting another great getaway - we're looking forward to next year, and to having you up for a visit here. Cheers.