Pregnancy.............

...............was not the bit of news that I had for you at the end of the last edition. Sorry to those of you who were hoping that it was, but Lea hasn't got time to be pregnant at the moment!!!!!

The news was that I have a new job. I didn't want to say anything last week as I hadn't quite got round to mentioning it at work, and I didn't want it to leak out unexpectedly. I will be leaving my current job at the end of this week and starting work next week on the remediation of contaminated soil sites. This fits in a bit better with my views of the world, and I will be doing something to help the environment rather than contributing to it's destruction as a biostitute.

That is pretty much the only non house related news. As ever, work continues steadily (but a little slowly). Having got the basement walls raised we had to take some of them down as our inspector (being a relic from the 50's) couldn't understand that they were acceptable. Sadly he only told us this at 9pm on a Friday night. As a result we faced the option of waiting until Monday morning to get Lea's boss to put his engineering stamp on them (but not being able to do anything else in the meantime), or just go ahead and rebuild the walls to his ancient specifications. We decided that we would rebuild and try and get to the point where we could sheath the walls. You can see us just finishing off the headplates in the next few photos.
















We also had some contractors on site roughing in the plumbing in the basement. This was pressure tested today so we are now ready to get all the insulation and rebar in place so that we can pour the basement slab.











We managed to get all the wall sheathing done over the weekend, but sheathing walls takes a lot longer than expected, and over the past week we have pounded around 4000 nails to get it all finished.













We had a fair amount of rain last week, so lost quite a lot of building time. Sunday turned out to be a nice calm day though, so we put a long day in, and packed up by moonlight.










The plan for tomorrow is to get the main floor joists in place so that the basement walls are stiffened up and we can finally backfill. This will be a major milestone for us, as we finally get out of the ground and start to build something that looks more like a house.

This week also sees my return to hospital for an appointment with the specialist about my brain issues. I am hoping that I will be given the all clear, and can come off the medication. I'll keep you all posted about that next time.

Thanks very much to everyone who has sent emails. As usual, I will try and get back to you as soon as possible.

Laters,
Rob and Lea

Basement, Birthdays and Burglary

So once again, an age has passed and I find that it's time to update you all on building progress and any other Canadian news.

Looking back through the mists of the past month, we spent an evening away from house construction to go to the theatre to see Phantom of the Opera. In all honesty, I wasn't that impressed, but Lea enjoyed herself. There seemed to be far too much unintelligible wailing for my liking, so I won't be recommending it to you!

Since then everything refocused on the house, and progress has been made on the basement. Following the pouring of the concrete footing we spent what seemed like an eternity loading gravel into the footprint. We both became pretty sick of the groundwork (which still isn't quite finished) and are desperate to get on with building something above ground level.













We also had our floor joists delivered, thinking that we would easily get to the stage where we could install them and then backfill against the basement walls. However, things seem to take a lot longer than we first imagined, so we still have a huge pile of floor joists, which we hope to put in place on Monday next week.








Last week we finally managed to get all the basement walls raised. We had been building these for a while, but needed some help from Rob and Faye to stand them up. Amazingly, the walls have stood up to the prairie winds and are still standing. We need to finish adding the head plates, and sheet them, and then we will be ready to add the floor joists.

Our birthdays this year were reasonably low key. Thanks very much to everyone who sents cards/messages/chocolates, they were much appreciated. I did allow myself a lie-in on my birthday, but by the time we managed to drag ourselves out of the flat we were greeted by a crime scene in the car park. Some cheeky scamp had smashed the window of our car and nicked our ipod. This caused us to waste almost a whole day trying to get everything sorted out. We managed to get some construction done, but not much, and we headed back into town to meet up with a few people for dinner and a few drinks.

Lea's birthday was similarly low key (without the robbery). We were both at work for the day, and managed to get out for some dinner before we headed out to the building site again. Strangely, we probably managed to achieve more in an evening on Lea's birthday than we did on the Sunday of my birthday!

I guess it's a pretty short blog entry this time, but there may well be some more news coming up pretty soon. Some of you may know what I am talking about, but most of you probably won't. I can't really mention anything at the moment, but over the next week or so it should all come out.

More soon..........

Rob and Lea