Merry Christmas from the Michener Manse

The Michener spread as seen from Rumney Rd., Dec. 14

Until well into November,  home was a 12 ft x 60 ft trailer with space heater heat. Needless to say, this situation was a perfect setup for freezing to death when/if the temperature took a plunge, so the heat was put on, more figuratively, to get builders/suppliers motivated to finish up. The sticking point?  A kitchen sink. You can't legally occupy your own house without a kitchen sink and an operating toilet, and if they catch you, the result is $200 a day in fines. Jim, our kitchen guy, finally came through with the counter for the kitchen and plumber Dave installed the sink. Re the toilet, our Johnny on the Spot had been long retired as only the brave or desperate now would chance freezing onto the toilet seat. House facilities, if a hike, were already installed/working and a lot more comfortable.

Finally - finally! toward the end of November we undertook the final backbreaking move from trailer to house -- this time w/o any help whatsoever and slugging it out until 1 a.m. the night before they came to pick up the trailer. It was move #5 in 2 years for long suffering Bob and Pat, who did their pack mule act getting the usual astonishing accumulation of Michener stuff out of the trailer before Armstrong Trailers came along to drag it away across our front field.

Bob & our super builder/general contractor Peter Wanless
in the Michener kitchen.

When the first persian rug went down, the transformation from disorganized mess to home began. Just in itme --- huge storms descended on Georgian Bay, dumping more than 20" of snow and turning the barren November trees and fields into a landscape of amazing beauty. Last weekend, our family assembled at the farm with Greg, our middle child, here from Brazil (though without our lovely daughter-in-law Carolina, still hard at  work in construction management in Rio de Janeiro), Julia, our baby, and Carl and Julie and our wonderful grandchildren Willow and Jean Jacques.

It was a time of celebration, satisfaction and exhaustion, as we contemplated all we'd done and wondered... how did we ever do it?
To all the friends and relatives who visit this blog, a very Merry Christmas ! & super 2011. Come back again... our story is not quite over yet!

On a walk with Bruiser and visiting from Brazil, Greg enjoys his first Canadian winter in 4 years.

Snow fun moving

On Friday November 5, having chosen a day featuring undoubtedly the worst weather so far of the month, the Micheners moved into their renovated new/old farmhouse. A mixture of rain and snow, aptly described by my brother as "sneet" was falling as we waited for Armstrong movers, who had picked up the contents of a locker in Toronto and pine furniture from an office at Eglinton and Laird before setting out for the wilds of Vasey. Though cold, wet and miserable,  everyone had the good sense not to complain and so Bob, Pat, son Carl and daughter Julia , Pat's bro Paul and couple of friends moved cartons that had sat in storage in the new garage since August into the house where -- days later --they are still sitting unopened.

Why? Because no sooner was the mammoth move over then we were onto move #5, getting our stuff out of the trailer so the rental company can tow it away. Are we ready to leave?  Not really. The house is only half done. So far,  the kitchen guy hasn't come through with the drawers/cabinets, the electrician hasn't connected the dishwasher, the vanities are not installed, etc. etc. but....

In the spirit of all veteran campers, we've moved in -- in our standard slow, disorganized, bumbly Michener fashion, we've made it into the new house and are now installed luxuriously in our king sized bed the only oasis in a thoroughly messy master bedroom. It's moving on the instalment plan, since we are still cooking, computing and emailing from the trailer. However, this schizophrenic phase is rapidly drawing to a close  on Friday when the trailer will be towed back to Barrie home base.

Because the weather has been so bright and beautiful, landscaping is underway. The gianormous rock that cropped up when the geothermal system was dug has found a zen-like garden location in the triangle formed by the breezeway connecting garage and house. Friend Steve Ogden, who came around with a variety of earth moving equipment, also miraculously turned the ugly mound of our septic mountain into what looks like a planned and pleasant hill featuring a circular walkway.

Even though all is a mess and the house, cleaned from top to bottom prior to the move, is once more thoroughly dusty and dirty, our house building experience looks to be just about over. Now it seems like an early Christmas as we open boxes to discover items barely remembered from the time we stowed them away, way back in early July.

The neck and neck race to beat winter

 It's close to the end of October, and with the help of a couple space heaters loaned by helpful neighbours, we are still in our not-so-cosy trailer. A light dusting of that white crap fell a night ago. It was an unpleasant reminder that soon we could be moving our possessions into our new/old house in the teeth of a roaring winter gale, which, in these parts you really have to see to believe just how bad that could be.

Part of the holdup is our kitchen guy, whose mother is very sick. This is an excuse for being two weeks late on delivery that only a jerk would dispute, and so we wait. But that is not to say nothing is happening, in fact, by all but the kitchen guy there is now a mad rush on to get finished, and get paid!

Check out the action for tomorrow, Monday. Plumber Dave will be here installing toilets, a work crew is coming in to finish up the stairs & balcony, install door hardware etc., the electricians are putting in the last potlites and fixtures, the painters will be doing the finishing touches, to deal with the filthy fingerprints, grout and stains left on the walls by guys who should know better, and friend Steve is arriving with his dozer to adjust the earth around the house and spread topsoil.

Another reason Steve is here is that our driveway recently claimed another victim. The poor sod that was delivering the flooring for our kitchen decided to back in and in the process fell into the gaping maw of the ditch along the south side, barely avoiding overturning and racking up a $400 towing fee. Steve will fill in the man-eating potholes and fix the ditch.

Despite its many deficiencies, of which the lack of a kitchen is only one, the house is just about finished! It's beautiful and full of light and space. Maybe it's tempting fate, but who cares. We've set November 4 for move-in date -- ready or not -- a phrase that also describes not just the house, but us.

Painted into a corner

As I probably said (just checked & yes, I am repeating myself), there is a fairly inflexible

sequence to the way houses are built and renovated. Before floors and trim can go on, the place must be painted. We are now at the painting stage and it's definitely crazy-making -- not necessarily for us, but for our painter.

Back in April, I told our general contractor that we would be painting everything in a Benny Moore colour called marble white. That is no longer the case - we have gone wild with colour. Bedrooms are blue and green, the pantry is flaming red, one bathroom is a bright gold, and we are driving our painter, Ingrid Hartsink, crazy.

Bruiser takes a stroll on our new deck.

The idea of having a nice neutral background throughout was very sensible. But then I became a Benjamin Moore colour book addict. With all those choices, suddenly off-white became, well, boring! It's totally necessary in the main room, where a jumble of highly colourful paintings, persian rugs and furnishings will all have to lump along together. But those colours and their seductive names, like Greenmount Silk and Summer Harvest, did me in and now for anyone who visits it, our farmhouse is likely to deliver the visual equivalent of electroshock.      

While the painter is hard at work, our construction crew has taken off after installing doors and locks. It's not like they haven't got lots to do -- the deck must be finished off and it sure would be nice to use steps instead of a concrete block, e.g. -- but other jobs urgently need to be done before freeze up. It takes a very rainy day indeed to get them back here and working inside, instead of running around the county pouring concrete and doing framing. Next week, however, they are all ours -- our contractor is going fishing and wants them doing something simple like putting in our flooring, while he's away. 

Not a bowling alley - the deck across the back of the house.

Meantime, almost every day we conduct a tour for friends, neighbours and occasionally even perfect strangers who drop by and want to see the manse. Should start to charge! And, as the weather gets cold, the heat is on to get into the house. Note to self: phone kitchen guy and tile guy and do some creative nagging! My squeaky wheel routine is about to get underway.

Work speeds up when there's a chill in the air

There's an appreciable nip in the air these September mornings. It's invigorated our hardworking team of young guys. Although the crew managed to keep up the pace even in the sweaty depths of a steamy August afternoon, now they've doubled it with the cooler weather and the end of the job in sight. Yes, our old garage covered in ancient insulbrick has been rejuvenated with the last of the siding. The construction team has now turned their attention to one of the final chores, completing the decks. This is  a new Trex product, Accents, that is wrapped in polychloride vinyl, not my favourite material but seeing as it will prevent problems like mold and staining etc. and involve NO WORK to maintain, we will manage to overlook this small environmental crime.

When the crew goes, I will miss them, their cheerful can-do attitude, real applied concentration on the job, friendly smiling faces and colorful language. In fact it is from them I have learned the amazing versatility of the work F**K, which, it seems, can be used, not just as an exclamation but a verb, adjective, noun, adverb, a gerund... you get the idea!

This coming Monday the painter starts work on the inside, following the departure of the drywallers and the mudders who filled in the cracks. Or, I should say, "mudder" since it was mostly one solitary older man with a moustache covered in finishing compound dust who put in 12 hour days working from daybreak until after dark with the aid of a work light.

I'm in awe of the work ethic of most of the tradepeople who worked on our project., starting usually at 7.15 and knocking off at 4 or later with only the shortest of breaks for coffee and lunch. The attitude was summed up by our lonely drywall finisher, who said, "when work comes along, it's take it or lose it." Like most, he was going on to another job on a tight deadline.

The final stages of outside work included a major mess made of our lawn by trenching for the new hydro line. I'm now re-planting all the peonies that had to be uprooted or else get squished by machines or heavy work boots, but the grass is a project for next spring. Local stone mason Pat Secord has done a fine job of the surround for our wood stove. In order to get this stove put in, however, even though our wood stove installer is certified, and the stove is certified, I had to get yet another "permit", which should roughly translate to "tax grab" in any language.

So... once the painting is done, the floors will go in, then trim and doors are installed, and, provided our kitchen guy comes through, who knows?  We might be into the house and out of our trailer by the end of September (and pigs might fly.)

Top photo: The Michener ranch in almost finished form. 
Second pix: Bob shows friend Mike O'Kane the progress since his last visit.
Bottom, the guys working away on the deck.  

One month later....

Why so long between posts, people have asked?

Well, until now progress was sort of incremental. But today this reno is storming ahead, so let me explain that building is sequential and nothing can happen until each individual step has been completed. For example, once the roof was on and framing completed, framing and plumbing inspection could take place. The furnace went in - a geothermal unit despite huge price tag and mess it created when field was dug up for piping. Ducting was installed. Then insulation could start - Dr. Foam arrived in a big truck for this job -- and soon, drywall will arrive.

The night before the plumbing inspection, one of the Sonitrol security system installers drilled a hole in a pipe by mistake and water pressure fell to zero. After a wild scramble, the hole was successfully repaired and next day the inspector gave it his stamp of approval.

Outside, siding action is slowly moving around to the front of the house, a bit of a problem spot it seems. Our contractor thought our "green" siding would clash with the blue roof but looks OK to me -- maybe I'M colourblind but the predominant colour appears to be beige. Did I mention that this is a new product, Naturetech see ? Underneath is another new product DELTA-DRY , which keeps rain/wind out while allowing the siding to dry & inside of the house to breath out excess moisture.

Amazing! The stuff you can order online! Our kitchen fan is being fedexed from Burnaby, B.C., internet marble vanity tops have been spec'd and will be delivered in 2 weeks. Whatever steps we can take to keep out of stores so as to stay in the sun at the dock, we will take!

Roof and windows, walls & doors

Great! We now have a front and a back door, and windows! A procession of trucks has been lumbering up our well-rutted farmhouse road and the most recent delivery, our Elite brand windows, have now been muscled into place by the Wanless Construction crew. This was a completely smooth operation, except for some cliffhanger moments when hefty double windows were handed up to a single second storey worker weighing considerably less that the windows he was hauling in.

Meanwhile, our dedicated puzzle solvers Randy and Louis of Mac Roofing continue to piece together the jigsaw of our multi-angled steel roof. Underneath the roof is not the usual flimsy tar paper but an underlayment called DELTA-TEK, an ultra tough membrane that repels water but still allows the new wood of the roof to dry and breathe. Randy has found he likes this new product from Cosella-Dorken and says he'll use it again.

By now, Bob and I have smartened up to the fact that if you don't tell tradespeople exactly what you want, good chance you won't get it. So hours have been spent poring over plans and plainly marking/noting each and every outlet, switch and light fixture, appliance and suchlike to be installed, an exercise that left me totally limp and drained from decision-making overload.

In fact, there still are a great many decisions left to make, the biggest one being the furnace, which will impose a major wallop in the wallet if we go geothermal. I will add that this decision should have been finalized long ago (but was not mine to make.) Intense heat has settled on the countryside and desperation has finally driven a few workers to splashdown in our pond. That's where I'd like to be -- if I didn't have to drive to town and choose a toilet and light fixtures. As I occasionally say, next time around I will come back as the family dog... so I have time to stop and smell the flowers.

Coulda been us!

On the afternoon of June 23 while driving to the farm to check on progress (or lack thereof, our construction team having absconded to a neighbouring farm to work on another new home), I noticed a very black, ominous, and sulphurous looking cloud boiling away on the horizon.
Safe in the relative comfort of our trailer, I looked through the window to see the monster heading toward us, intent on doing damage. A wall of water slapped into the farm buildings and as the trailer began to rock violently in the wind, I finally wondered... "is this a tornado?  And in that case, what ought I to be doing?" Duh!

However by the time this bright thought occurred, the rain had diminished to a dull roar, and Bob was coming through the door of trailer. He had stopped into the local SPCA and the wind pressure was such that he couldn't even open the door of his car. We checked. Other than the occasional branch lopped off a tree, no problem and the barn and house still had their roofs.

Yes, we were survivors of the Midland tornado, which ripped along nearby highway 12 demolishing buildings and trees. We were lucky. Mother Nature always seems to have a special hate on for trailers. This time she chose the trailers beside Little Lake park, fortunately most were weekend residences vacant at the time, but it could so easily have been me blown away in our trailer to the Land of Oz.

But back to business. By now the tempo has picked up. A full scale, sit down meeting with our contractor, instead of the usual-off-the-cuff quick commentary while running through the house.  A procession of contractors pitching air-to-air and geothermal heating systems. A kitchen contractor, Jim Lansing, who was very nice not to laugh at my bad hand-sketched kitchen plans. A huge number of decisions, made on the fly, which we may just regret afterward, about where to put items like washers and dryers, doors and the like. And a first meeting with our roofers, Randy and Louis, who are attempting to put on our complex multi-angled roof. Now, all they - and we - need is a few days of no wind and sun, to get this job on the road, because not much can be done until the roof is on and the house closed in. A good thing we have them to blame for the slow progress, because, by dragging our feet and not getting our act together for electrical, decor and heating decisions, the finger now is starting to point to us!

The ominous sounds of silence

While renovating their Toronto house a few years ago, friends of ours rented a tiny one-bedroom apartment. When it came time to move into their new, highly modernized home, they experienced a strange reluctance -- the reluctance of people who have discovered how liberating it is not to have much stuff, or much more than a couple rooms to worry about, and a very good excuse to eat out at restaurants. 

Except for always finding one another at the kitchen sink, I expect Bob and I will feel the same on leaving our trailer, which has pared life down to its basics - so basic that getting rid of dirt is now just a matter of a stiff broom and an open front door.  I arrived at the farm late Thurs nite. More progress -- the breezeway between garage and house has been constructed and plans that always looked kind of weird to me now seem completely comprehensible.

However, the next morning, instead of the usual sound of hammers at 6.30, there was only bird song. Silence is beautiful, that is, until you connect it with the fact that nothing is happening. Our work crew, it seems, has moved up and on to build a new house 2 concessions over for Brian Ritchie, the son of our neighbour Dave. They are taking advantage of the fine weather and the break that opens up because you can't do anything much more until the roof goes on. This may be sooner than expected. As of today, Monday, the steel for the roof had arrived and the roofers will soon make the scene.


The individual who didn't make the scene as expected on Friday morning, or even Saturday for that matter, was our electrician Paul. Just as, unusually well dressed, we stepped out of the trailer Sunday morning to go to church, he appeared. Walking a house with an electrician and making critical decisions is bad enough when you're in good shape, but just try it when you're starving. We left him to walk the property while we went to church. Soon we were back and since he was still there we ignored stomach rumbles and went through the tough job of deciding on lights and outlets. Found out, during the process, that we had better get our act together and do some space and furniture planning! Not that I have any confidence in my ability to do this type of thing...

Above: a new breezeway now covers the space between house side door and garage. 
Bob trims back the red pine that has dropped some limbs to the crane and other machines. 

The Septic Tank Mountain

Well, I promised to warn folks about dumb things we did/ shouldn't have done when building a house in the country and here's a good one: don't build a septic tank mountain.

The blame is not really ours. While it may not show up on the accompanying photo, the installer of our septic bed saw nothing wrong with creating a huge hill to accommodate the septic instead of properly preparing this area with sand and then excavating downward. Problem is, there is now no economical way to fix it except to try to landscape around it, and the hump, as we call it, makes this  lower field, one of the few arable places on our farm, unusable.

Can you tell that I am ticked off?  How did you guess!  This is the type of thing that a contractor should discuss beforehand and sort out with the homeowner, who just may have plans that don't include  a ski jump in the backyard!

Other than that, the second floor is now shaping up with a spectacular view from the deck that takes in Georgian Bay including the ski runs across the lake at Blue Mountain, and from here, you can't see the backyard bump at all.

Son Greg, visiting from Brazil, takes in the great view from the 2nd storey.  

House trussed & taking shape

Like giant pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, and definitely not one of the quick and mindless variety, the roof trusses for the house and garage were assembled on Friday. Less than ideal conditions, i.e. mostly streaming rain, did not cramp the style of contractor Peter Wanless and our intrepid crane operator.

A real show of skill: contractor quickly sorted out out what went where and attached the rope; crane operator lifted the individual trusses way up and over roof and trees, turned them to face the right way, dropped them into the outstretched hands of the installer, then dipped the crane to undo the rope and traversed back to the field to pick up another truss, all in one rapid, fluid and almost continuous motion. Neat!

In the supersatch conditions of Friday, the work ploughed on without any concessions to the weather, even wet weather gear, except for "the contractor's raincoat", a handy garment made by cutting head and armholes in a garbage bag. My shoes squelched through the mud as I walked the distance between barn and trailer carrying the essentials for our new home. After all this time moaning about the lack of rain, however, who can complain?

The Shape of Things to Come

Last week was frame up time, which can bring both both shocks and surprises. That's when you see exactly where the doors and windows are, and how big rooms will be when completed. That's when you discover you should have paid more attention and taken off those rose colored specs when surveying plans, in order to make sure that big, bulky objects could be easily taken into the cellar from the foyer or that the refrigerator would fit in that exact corner.

But aside from a few minor blips, all is going well with encouraging evidence of even quicker progress to come. Beams and trusses were delivered before the weekend. They are now awaiting the crane that will lift them into place -- a job I would like to watch, if anyone ever phones to tell us when this is going to happen! With multiple projects and crews to supervise, a popular contractor like Peter Wanless is continually yanked in different directions and customer contact, unless you are on the spot he is, might be a little low on the priority list.

The trailer we temporarily call home is slowly being set up. After the dust/dirt of our occasional stay in a house under construction, small things get us excited, like.... Lights! a working refrigerator and stove! Hot & cold water! Unfortunately, very soon the the flow of water dwindled to a trickle and then stopped. Plumber blames electrician and vice versa, but expect the finger pointing soon will stop in favour of getting it fixed.

As May draws to a close, phenomenal weather ... star studded nights, fireflies winking, roses blooming, , and daily the sun keeps blazing, turning our tin can home into a very hot pressure cooker that only a turkey would hang around, so I am mostly out doing chores. Rain this week? I sure hope so.

Two platforms for success

Well, this was definitely one memorable Victoria Day weekend.

Son Greg, seen here with his lovely & long-suffering wife Carolina, graduated PhD from U Texas in political science, with many kudos for his thesis on freedom of information legislation is South America. All the friends and family members who attended helped turn this long awaited event in weird and wonderful Austin into not just a Big Occasion but a Blast.

Back home, no time to recuperate before exchanging finery for jeans and scooting off to the farm. One big draw: the arrival (finally!) of our mobile home, which provided great entertainment for the neighbours in its travels along County Road 4 and across our fields. My admiration for the driver who managed to deposit it in the comparatively tight space

in the barnyard. If you can overlook the pretty awful decor including nauseatingly pink carpet it should be a comfortable enough place to hang out during the construction months, even featuring a second bedroom for adventurous guests. Bruiser surveyed it and has already decided his favourite place is the kitchen.

If you live in the country, then do not expect to arise at normal, civilized city hours. I woke up not to the sound of birds but hammers at 6 a.m. being wielded by a crew of three young guys, Tyler, Tom and Jeremy, who were putting the final touches to the platform that forms the base for the house. Next, the

walls, and then, shortly, the trusses will arrive. The garage as well is rapidly taking shape lacking only roof and siding. However, there was little time to contemplate this progress. Very shortly we were rushing to get ready for the next stage, where our construction/demo crew equipped with crowbars broke through the walls of the old house in order to frame up the new entrance. Once more the tarpaper and ancient Typar revealed walls that can best be described as crumbly. Surprising that no wind ever came along to blow the whole thing away!

As well as acting as mule moving stuff, I put on my gardener hat to plant, in what remains of the garden, some exciting tomato varieties with exotic names like Big Belgian and Striped German. They were a present to us by friend Russ Brown who grows them from seeds only to give them away to us and other tomato afficionados. Bob and I also were waterboys, hauling water from our pond to save trees. Most of our maples trustingly put out leaves this spring only to be blasted by a sneaky late frost, with the result that thousands of baby leaves litter our driveway. This happened before and the maples will replace them, given enough moisture, but other than the occasional cloud, so far there's no sign of rain this dry, hot spring....

The Garage and its many uses

In the countryside around our farm, the garage is not merely a place to park your vehicle.

On a hot summer's day, take a drive and chances are you will see any number of families in their garages. They're sitting in lawn chairs facing the road, listening to the radio and reading their papers or just watching the passing cars. A nice pitcher of iced tea is on a table close at hand. Of course this is only one use. In our area the garage is usually heated and equipped with a workbench. It also becomes a man den in the winter and an acceptable way to escape from the house (wife) and look busy even though the main work being done turns out to be the depletion of the garage refrigerator stocked with cold beer.

Last weekend we moved the bar a bit further when we turned the garage into a kitchen. In order to meet various contractors & suppliers we had to stay overnight and since the upstairs bedrooms are still usable, and there is a johnny on the spot, a fridge and a microwave.... The chest freezer was a handy work surface and Bob provided some chairs and a table. All went well until we had to wash dishes - and ourselves. SOON, I hope, our mobile home will arrive as fields are getting drier and I do not want husband getting too comfortable with this setup!

Anyhow, having to stay over Sunday, on Monday morning we did get to see some quite amazing bulldozer work by Kirk Hastings who turned up at 8 a.m. to backfill. How anyone can get a 4 ton dozer to handle dirt so delicately and quickly while manoevering around various concrete pillars and supports without knocking them silly is beyond me. When complimented, Kirk said we were lucky to get him on a Monday instead of a Friday. For certain an awesome amount of concentration is required for this job!

One last chore before leaving Monday was to dispose of yet another racoon. This critter was quickly demolished in the wee hours of the morning by Bruiser, seen sulking at not being able to gloat over his trophy. Bob threw it up on the garage roof, then later put it out in the field where the local buzzards will find it and Bruiser won't.
Today, Tuesday, framing begins as Peter's crew build the platform for the first floor.

Above: Kirk Hastings uses semi-surgical skill to backfill between garage and house foundations, a job complicated by all the supports for the deck that will go up after the house is built.
Next: Bob and Peter check over the foundations now waterproofed with DELTA-MS.

Dimples make for a dry bottom

How do you keep basements dry? A not unimportant question in our neck of the woods, where you can find a good source of water just by sticking a pipe in the ground.
There are springs everywhere and in spring, the ground itself is a giant sponge. In parts of our property, water wells up in your footprints even in August.
But back to the basement. Contractor Peter Wanless ordinarily just uses tar. This stuff, sprayed on the outside of the basement, is toxic, yuck, and the fact is that if water wants to find a way in, tar is hardly going to stop it.

So we used a product that tract builders in Ontario have almost universally adopted, called DELTA-MS, see www.deltams.com  Its dimples create an airspace next to the foundation wall so that if water gets in, it flows down and out to the tile at the footings. Builders discovered that when they used it, there were no more call backs by buyers of their homes to complain about leaky basements.

On Wednesday, the crew came out to install this material -- none had any experience with it, so major learning curve. However, after a review of the detailed instructions and a few runs at it, they were installing like pros. Tiling should have happened today, then stone slinger and next week -    

- if all goes well -- they'll start framing up... then everything will start moving much faster.

Some concrete progress

There is nothing more real than concrete. That is, now that the foundations are in place, our reno finally has made the transition from vaporware to reality. Suddenly, we think, there are visible results for all the time and expense to date.

Just to fortify this impression, at the end of our visit yesterday our contractor handed us a bill for something shy of $40,000 -- fortunately the maple between garage and house is still standing and I could lean on it for support.

A walk around the foundations showed that yes, indeed we will have a very fine view but basement will be sticking out of ground quite a bit and rather unsightly. A lengthy discussion with contractor Peter about the siding, a relatively new product made in Quebec see http://www.kwpproducts.com/  Ecology is a big consideration and this engineered wood looks good and meets our specs.

However, Bob very concerned re fire rating -- guess the cedar shingles on the old house that ignite at a touch of a match were never an issue! In fact, maybe we were waiting all this time for it to burn down!

Upstairs in the old house the bathroom is crying out for me to do something. On the drive back to TO, made a quick visit to Bathworks in Barrie to get this project underway.

Our mobile home still hasn't arrived. Fields are tooo wet and driver is waiting until they dry out -- based on weather to date, maybe this never will happen and the back-and-forth to TO will go on indefinitely!

What the dozer did

Latest visit to the farm found a yawning pit and finally! we get some idea of the actual size of the new addition from its footprint. It's all very well to look at blueprints but by walking around the excavation, now we know for sure -- it's going to be B-I-G.

This pleases Bob who has always nurtured ambitions of living in a castle.

As the caretaker of the castle, perhaps not equally thrilled but console myself with the often repeated (and probably untrue) statement, "a big house is no harder to keep clean than a small one." Thanks Martha Stewart, get back to you on that one.

Anyhow, this big pit would shortly be filled with forms and poured concrete foundations. Luckily, no major downpours came to muck it up.

However, a few days later when the first concrete truck rolled down our driveway, the driver, distracted by the overhanging trees, did a jig when he should have jogged and the truck went off the road. It was stuck in the wet field, teetering on the edge of falling over when my ordinarily unflappable contractor phoned up in a flap. Peter said a tow truck had been called and sure enough, soon a super sized version of a tow truck came along and hauled him out -- the concrete was still pourable so no damage done overall except to mental health of driver/contractor.

Anyhow, we head to the farm this weekend for another exciting installment and to welcome our mobile home. Yes, Virginia, there are people crazy enough to trade in their castle in the city to become trailer trash in the country, and we are they!

Above, various views of the foundation dig out incl garage in weird location to avoid maple tree which may yet die.

What the dozer found

As of Wednesday the dig was underway. When we arrived, the south foundation wall of our century farmhouse with its rubble and mortar wall and ancient handmade wooden door and threshhold, was exposed, Massive boulders had been unearthed by the dozer, but thank heavens, not the big shelf of bedrock we had been warned by former owners might be lurking under the basement of the rooms now demolished, just waiting to throw a spike in the works.

All of us, including the contractor and dozer operator, were amazed at how incredibly dry the earth was -- almost devoid of moisture in this strange, unusually early and dry spring. Meantime, a procession of trucks rumbled in with loads of sand for the septic bed, dumped them out in the field and then hauled away the dirt. Bob and I dodged the trucks to rescue a couple white lilacs clinging to the edge of the pit and barely alive and plopped them unceremoniously into quickly dug holes. Checked this Saturday, they appear to be flourishing.

There were other signs of progress, including a new coat of foil covered insulation over the antique tarpaper on the farmhouse walls, but the big point of interest was the stake out for the new addition and the garage. What didn't we go through during the planning process to save the old maple near the house! Looks like there will be only minor damage to its roots from the garage foundation, but what a pain if it dies after all this trouble... forever leaving visitors wondering, "now why did they put the garage in such a weird location?"