North Glenora Reno

It is only Thursday but it has been a very busy week…we have lined up the electrician to move the services to the garage and then to trench it to the house. Well, he is not going to dig the trench, (the 1 meter deep trench) but he will come and put the cable in the ground and make all of the appropriate connections after we dig it. He starts on Monday. Holy shit, a 25 foot trench through 60 year old clay, by hand, by Monday. No problem.
But wait…we also have to finish demo before Monday as super framer Rob comes on Monday too. I’m sure there is nothing else happening on Monday…

Anyway, today…I have officially changed my allegiance from Chad the excavator to Steve the digger. As I am sure I said yesterday (I did didn’t I?), Steve came by last night to dig the piles for us but the mini digger was in the way with no possibility of moving it. None the less, Steve measured and marked the piles for us anyway and even came up with a solution to create an offset pile over the gas line so we didn’t have to dig two to create a bridge. Anyway, this afternoon Steve came back to dig the piles. He must have made a special effort to rearrange his schedule so that he could do our job.
So, he came with the keys for the mini digger, moved that and the concrete pieces that were in his way and together we dropped the telecommunication lines and propped up the power line so that he could drive to the three pile locations on the south edge of the yard. His words, when we were done “well, that’s about as scary as it gets”. We were so close to the power line that it was indeed a bit scary. WCB would have shut us down, for sure. Love Steve!
Anyway, we go to bed tonight looking forward to an actual concrete floor in the basement, a filled in (with concrete) sewer trench and 7 new piles to support the bit of covered deck and the rest of the deck. I am so excited!

R is taking the day off on Monday, so we will sort out a whole bunch of details that we both need to be part of.

So today, we sorted out the roofing and solved the whole “can’t dig a pile right where the gas line is” crap. After much discussion and thought and more discussion with the guy who came to actually dig the piles, we have come up with an off-set pile to solve the problem. Man, I hope it works.
This morning, my mom and R’s parents showed up to supply some free grunt labour. We, as a crew, accomplished the following by 3pm…baseboard and trim removed from both the spare room and the eating area (plus all of the nails pulled), removed the light fixture and plugins from the spare room along with those in the eating area, pulled the siding off of three of the exterior walls, and pulled out the laminate in the spare room. A few minor injuries and some inevitable soreness and I say a job well done.

We are so thankful for our families, they are making this insanity worth while and not quite so frantic or insane.

Tonight, we go back to the pit and continue getting rid of the extra gravel and the concrete and clay debris from the basement. The fun and exhaustion never end!

After having little luck getting roofing companies to even call me back, we made a very quick decision about what company to go with.

I have called no less than 7 different companies. Of those, two were small operations that were recommended and the other five, I found their websites and called. One of those five called me back. ONE. I was pissed to say the least.
We ended up going with the company that did R’s parent’s roof. We were not only swayed by their glowing recommendation but were also super impressed with both Wes and Debbie of Hache Roofing Inc.. They were both really nice and knowledgeable and made us feel very confident in their quote and work….AND they came in $3000 cheaper (for the same product) that the other (big name company) quote we have received thus far. They have put aside two days for us once the framing is done.

http://www.hacheroofinginc.ca/

One less task off my plate!

Today was a busy, busy day. Dad and Bill came to re-route the sewer main and add a new drain for the furnace and new laundry location. My dad is a crazy work horse, he gets going on a job and just doesn’t stop and he always tells you that it is no problem. Yep, a no problem job that took him all day. Anyway, it looks fantastic and I am so thankful for him and his great work.

Before…

After…

It turns out that it will be well worth all of the work as the old pipe was corroded and thus sewage was seeping into the ground! Yeah! I knew that something wasn’t smelling as rosy as I expected it should yesterday. Anyway, inspection tomorrow and then concrete. I got back on the countertop and blind adventures and requested consultations from Costco for each. We have heard really great things from several people about the products and services for renovations from them so we are hoping for great things. The guy who did K & M.A.’s roof also came by today to estimate and since I called him only is morning, I was pretty pleased with him too. We’ll see.
Despite this, I think that we have unofficially chosen our roofer only 2 quotes in. The people who did R’s parent’s house have been fantastic so far and blew Great Canadian Roofing out of the water with their quote. Two more quotes to go but we really like this little company.
I dug to China to expose the gas line today and low and behold it is exactly where we need to dig one of the piles for the roof and deck supports. Super! We are looking at maybe doing some kind of bridge piles and hope that that will work. Ahhh, another call to Chad.
Finally, mom and I emptied both the eating area and the spare bedroom. All three dogs supervising was super helpful.

Rob the framer and his crew arrived this morning at 7:30 not 7:31 not 7:29, 7:30. I am so happy to have him here and the early wake up (on a holiday Monday no less) has been forgiven because….We have floor joists and a FLOOR! I was so please that I took a few beautiful moments to just lie down on the floor in the sun and contemplate installing a few skylights. That’s right, made of money we are. Then I got up into reality and went to make dinner.
BTW, we are officially speaking in units, not dollars anymore. Holy shit.

I really wanted to move the laundry room. Great idea. No big deal right? Just add a new drain over to the new area, send some water over then and hook them up. I mean the jack hammering wasn’t so bad, was it sweetie? The blisters and feeling that you are still vibrating a week later will go away soon, right? Sounded simple enough to me until I realized that we needed to dig 8 inches of dirt out of the trench, well not really, dirt as I soon discovered…clay. I love clay, especially hard, wet, heavy clay. So much fun. I don’t remember the last time I had sweat dripping into my eyes from so much exertion. Oh yeah, and R discovered that he hadn’t jackhammered quite enough concrete out and got to hack out the rest with a sledgehammer and some choice words.

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.