North Glenora Reno

We finally have access to the new portion of the basement. I came home from a night at the lake and found that we had gravel in the pit and cut lines in the basement walls. The pieces were pulled out by one of Chad’s guys. It was fun to watch albeit a bit anticlimactic. R and his dad built a header for the larger cutout and they sealed it up. This is real now, there is again, no going back. The pool is not longer an option. I guess we are going ahead with this addition thing.

Today the building materials arrived from Rona. They have been awesome so far and didn’t disappoint today. The morning didn’t start well, my truck developed a major oil leak overnight and it needed to be it towed. Whenever anything goes wrong with one of the vehicles I immediately see dollar signs and boy did I see them today. The short version of the story is a good one. It turns out that it was a safety recall and with fact that it happened on our driveway and not while I was driving saved us our engine. Other than the tow, it didn’t cost us a thing. Thank goodness.

Of course, everything happens as once, so while I am waiting for the tow truck, the Rona delivery guy shows us to deliver four pallets of building materials and my truck is blocking some of his access to put it in the garage. The Rona guy was awesome, he helped me push back the truck, spent a ton of time trying to get the materials into the garage and even helped the tow truck driver move my truck into the alley so that he could get it hooked up to be towed.

After all this, I finally took off to the lake with a friend, for a much needed 24 hours of break.

R spent most of the afternoon attached to a jackhammer. He is probably still vibrating, poor guy. We needed to create a trench for a new drain line and allow room to move the sewer stack from the middle of the hall in the basement to a wall, you know so we cam actually walk by. The jackhammering, although very hard, made pretty quick work of the concrete and now we just have to dig down to create room for the pipe. Easy as pie…

Windows! Windows! Windows! The windows came today! They are beautiful, amazing and huge! Mere minutes after I finished giving foot baths to three dogs (yes, it rained again last night), Daryl and his guys showed up at 8:30 and were in and out in about an hour. The bathroom window is so big, I didn’t really realize until I saw it, how crazy high the ceiling is going to be in the bathroom. There will be such amazing morning light, we won’t have to turn lights on until winter. I was so busy being excited and checking to see that we had received all of the windows that I missed a rather important detail that of course R pick up on the second he saw the when he got home from work. The screens are white. White framed screens in beautiful raw pine windows. It looks like shit. We can’t have them and I don’t even want to think about how much this little mistake is going to cost us.

Backfill! The mountain is finally gone. Left behind is a small hill. After 25 days of not being Abe, to see the garage, it has reemerged along with the giant hosta and several amazing grasses. I remember when I was a gardener and not a contractor!

One of the reasons, besides the never ending rain, that we have not yet cribbed the basement yet is the fact that the eating area addition rests on piles and does not have a basement below it. This has caused major issues and discussion around how we will can have a wall between the eating area piles and the new space. The cribbers can not build a wall if they can’t get all around it and there has to be something to hold the dirt in and create a wall for the basement. We looked at the possibility leaving the cribbing wall on the dirt side permanently (super expensive and no one will do it), the styrofoam block stuff (expensive), or a wood wall. We chose to go with the wood wall, it will be 8 inches thick, waterproofed and ultimately warmer than the concrete. Now as long as they build it properly and there is no way for it to rot, we have a solution. Now if we could only make it stop raining long enough to have it built and installed. Here’s hoping!

Rainiest July on record…great!

It is it pretty hard to do much of anything when the sky keeps pissing on us. Perhaps we aren’t meant to have a new basement and master bedroom. Maybe just maybe, a pool is in order. I do need a new bathing suit for school…hmmm.

Weeping tile and water proofing on the new foundation today. The poor guy who came to do it got caught in another of our crazy July rain storms but still kept on working to get it done. Needless to say, just about as soon as he was done the job and was soaked to the bone and covered in mud and clay…the rains stopped. Great.

The footings survived the night and now we have cribbing walls! The guys were here bright and early loading the cribbing walls in by hand, building the forms and finally, finally they poured concrete into the forms. We have basement walls!! Well, 5 of the 6 we need.

Two weeks of nothing and finally in a small patch of sunlight, we have footings! Of course, not 20 minutes after they pour the concrete and leave a storm arrives. I raced around like a lunatic, borrowing tarps from the neighbours, using our tarps and even using blue recycling bags to cover the fresh footings. No sooner do I finish covering them when the rains stop, leaving me with clay squishing between my toes and being soaked to the bone. The sun burst out and I scrambled back into the mud to now uncover the footings. Fun, fun, fun.