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