A few weekends ago I took the weekend to put up some fences on both sides of our back lawn. One is taller and a little more private, the other a little fancier for our neighbours we like a little more.
One of the upcoming projects is to put up a deck outside the back door so we’re not sitting outside on the ugly concrete. However another project was looming which had to come ahead of that one. I needed to get power to the garage. The previous owners had strung extension cables and attached them to the cable and telephone wires which run through our backyard.
So the project was to break the layers and layers of concrete and dig an 18″ ditch between the back of the house and the garage – about 38′ distance.
Two challenging pieces – breaking the concrete and threading the wire in to the conduit (we decided to use an old, broken hose as the conduit as it’s non-shattering and would protect the wire from the frost.
It’s almost done with the ditch dug, and mostly refilled after the wire strung below.
Pictures to follow.
So it stopped raining about 1/2 hour later, and then took another hour or so to dry. I went at it again and got the tar paper up by around 6 and then started shingling the roof, starting, of course, on the side that is the hardest to see from the sides of the house or the back and laid the first set of tiles from there.
Below are some pictures from later in the day (bigger this time):
This morning I went to the doctor’s office, then went out an picked up some materials at Roof Mart. I then started installing the eaves drip aluminium around the edges, which involved changing out some of the sheeting. I then started on the underlayment and it’s now raining.
So here’s some pics of what’s done so far today:
We have to thank all those who came by last Friday for our housewarming party. I was a fun night. It’s too bad we don’t have any pictures for it as we lost our camera a few days earlier in a Canoing incident in Temagami.
We are almost ready for a next burst of activity on the house now that we are very close (we hope) to having this financing behind us. All the things that need doing … main floor trim, gas lines, venting, stove hood, vanities, lights, 3rd floor hardwood. All coming to this site soon.
So someone told me the other day that, as an alternative to doing stucco on the outside walls we could do our outside siding with magicboard. Magicboard is that material that is used behind showers and tile walls. It’s totally waterproof and, from what I hear, it can be taped, plastered and painted and look almost the same as stucco. I was told it has almost the same R value as stucco and is actually much harder so it won’t dent as Stucco seems to.
Anyone with some insights into this type of siding feel free to send them along. We’re gong to need to work on the outside siding very soon.
Over the past work Melinda and I have been doing a lot of smaller projects after much of the kitchen is in.
During the week I installed the dishwasher and a nice gooseneck faucet that the lady from City Home Granite brought with her when she templated the counter tops. It was a lot of piping, soldering and electrical work, and there were some issues along the way, but it’s going now and it’s cleaning the dishes well.
We unpacked most of the kitchen boxes last weekend and put them into the cabinets. There’s even a bit of room left over.
Since then we’ve been doing a lot of little things like cleaning the place up, picking up a dining room table top and setting it up, moving furniture, and cleaning up the back garden.
Our neighbours have a bunch of concrete to get rid of so one of my projects this week is going to be to get someone to come with a bin and remove our big pile of rocks from the back yard. That will make the place much nicer!
Today was a beautiful long weekend Saturday so we went this morning to get some paint for the main floor walls and some sod for the front lawn.
In the afternoon we laid a nice front lawn.
Heading off to the Crooked Star for a drink now.
So I chatted with Ed Calder this morning about the kitchen coming and now he says it won’t be here until next week – definitely next Tuesday he says. It’s disappointing. I guess this is par for the course on getting kitchens delivered.
He gave some lame excuse about his guys running off to Cape Breton and he’s waiting for the stain to dry.
And speaking of annoyances, our webhost has been changing his service around and that’s why the site has been down a lot lately. We apologize for the disruption in service. It hasn’t been working totally right for a few weeks, but mostly only for things we’d notice.Â
This weekend we did a bit of work on the house. We put some drywall around the pocket door and plastered and taped it in. It’s looking good.
Also Joe, our neighbour, let us his jackhammer, which he had borrowed from his work and we took down the most of the cement wall around our back patio.
Update: Finally we’ve uploaded the pictures! Here they are.
It has been far too long since we have posted new pictures up on our .mac picture site. So I finally put some up today. A lot of what we have done in the last month or so has been little things – plumbing, a pocket door, some floor tiles and many haven’t been worth too many pictures.
I’ve also posted a couple pictures of our new kittens on the page. Yes, it’s totally unrelated to house building but they are cute anyway.
Here’s the pictures.
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