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?"