At this point mum and dad were still with us, so Lea continued to work them hard for their last day in Saskatchewan. Lea was delighted to see them leave a second time, but is looking forward to welcoming them back to a finished house next time. However, with Lea having put up with my parents it was my turn to welcome the mother in law, as Lea`s mum arrived from Denmark for 3 weeks.
Having the basement slab poured meant that we could finally get backfilled. We were pretty pleased to finally have the hole in the ground filled in, as it meant we only had 13 feet to drop if we fell off the edge instead of 22 feet! And it also meant that Lea could put her mum to work straight away as the pair of them made a start on finishing the sheeting on the main floor. I followed progress from the comfort of my office, and was pleased to see that they did pretty much all of it, so that I didn`t have to do much!
Once the sheeting was finished it was time to make a start on raising the walls on the first floor. By this point I was starting to get a bit concerned. I always knew that the house was going to be big, but once we had been backfilled I realised that we could quite easily have put a roof on instead of the first floor, and the house would still be huge. Added to this we have a 14 foot ceiling upstairs on the south, and the size of the house was starting to be a bit overwhelming.
When they heard that there were walls to raise Stan and Nicole, once again, volunteered for a day of labouring (I dread to think what we would have achieved without these people!). Sure enough they turned up at 9am ready to get some walls in place. They even bought Carter and Cassidy with them who we dutifully put to work carrying wood around for us (I don`t think they have laws about child slavery here).
Over the course of the day we managed to get the whole north wall up and half of the east wall. Carter managed to get hos own back for being put to work by eating all my cookies and all my lollies. I managed to forgive him though, as Nicole had made a dinner for us all. This was very much appreciated as I was dead on my feet as we packed up in the dark after a full day`s work.
Today Lea and I spent the day out there hoping to get some more of the exterior walls raised. However, it was far to windy to be raising any sheeted walls today, so we settled for the interior walls instead. The good news is that my TV lounge now has four walls. I am tempted to just put a roof on it and forget about the rest of the house, but I don`t think that Lea will allow me to. We also had a bit of a tidy up, so that we could crate some space to make the remaining walls. You can see in one of the pictures below quite how tall our walls are going to be at the south of the house. You may be thinking that such a tall wall doesn`t belong where it is standing, and you would be right. However, we bolted in place there so that we could create a bit more floor space to work on.
As we were packing up this evening I noticed that I was being watched from behind a pile of materials. A curious little weasel was wandering round checking out what was going on, so I sat down for a while to be at one with nature. Luckily weasels like to eat mice, and seeing as I found the first mouse inside the house today I look forward to having the weasel in the area for a long time to come.
I now have 2 weeks of leave from work so that we can get the house to something approaching weatherproof. Hopefully this means that we should be making some pretty quick progress over the next couple of weeks.
In non-house news this time, I am finally off my warfarin. This is pretty handy as the indoor football season is just about to start, and I have managed to get my place back in the squad. It`s also pretty handy as it means that I will be able to poison rats and mice with my left over prescription (Incidentally I do plan on setting up some mousetraps around the house using tin cans, wire, a bucket of water and some peanut butter, I`ll keep you posted on the success of them!).
Also we received a phone call from Hannah last weekend who told us that she was going to be getting married in September next year. I can only assume that her fiance Andy is either stupid, or insane, but good luck to the pair of you! This means that we now have plans to be back in the UK in 2009. Hopefully we will be able to catch up with a lot of you while we are back.
That`s pretty much it for now.
Laters,
Rob and Lea
