poplar road

We spent another dusty weekend in the basement, trying to get the drywall done. Not quite there yet - lots of finicky bulkheads and a couple of other small jobs to do - but here are some pics of the latest.

The main room downstairs is the size of our living room, dining room, kitchen and entry put together, and now that the boards are mostly up, it looks very bright, spacious and perfect for entertaining. Eventually. You just have to imagine some furniture and a baby grand piano to go with the pool table.

We expect to finish the last of the boarding this coming weekend, and have the mudder/taper in next week. Not sure what more has to be done before we have the advisor come in to do phase 2 of our EcoEnergy assessment, but we're close, and really looking forward to the grant cheque! Drywall - maybe primer since we've got some on hand and we have a sprayer - is about as far as we'll get for now. Our focus has moved outside... wait 'til you see the changes in our back yard. We're going to have a lot more fun this summer! And someone pointed out we'll have a good backup plan if it rains on the August long weekend. Yes.

Remaining ceiling boards went up Saturday, walls Sunday.

This wall hides under-stair storage and mechanical room.

Guest room closet, before all the teeny pieces.

Richard finished wiring the posts so we had power.

Sound insulation between laundry and family room.

So much better than old faux wood siding!

Looking from entrance across family room - isn't it bright?

The hallway - walls for the bathroom, what a treat.

Here's our huge new family room!

Finishing up for the weekend.

No, I’m not talking about Chris and Dagny’s new French bulldog puppy. Lulu just likes a photo op. What followed Richard home on the back of his trailer (because there’s no way it would have made it here under its own power, had it even had wheels) is a 1969 Kaiser Jeep CJ6. (I wanted to say, “what’s left of it” but Richard was deeply offended.)

This rare pile of red scrap metal is actually the ideal foundation of Richard’s next 4x4, something that can still drive on the road (when mated to a 1994 Jeep YJ), has the requisite long wheel-base for our favourite rock-crawling locales like Moab (where we're headed next month), but won’t do the kind of extreme trails Mechano used to (ie, Missezula) in favour of more leisurely wheeling. Poor, beaten-up Mechano will one day rise again as pure extreme event buggy – and I will revert back to camera-lugging superfan on the sidelines. Buggies go faster and I much prefer tortoise speeds, thanks. But we’ll have the Jeep for trail rides, and aside from having to re-learn using a clutch, I’m psyched.

Mind you, the CJ6 won’t be done in time for Moab, no way. For this trip, (my third or fourth?), we’ll take the YJ “donor” truck, which other than engine issues is working well enough, and doesn’t have to survive past the last day of wheeling in Moab anyway since it’s going to be chopped up for parts. It's a much better solution than the steep fees to rent a Jeep there for three days of wheeling! And if I end up denting it in a few places, it won’t matter a bit. I’ll be missing Mechano’s squishy 44” tires, and probably its long wheel-base and airbags as we rattle along in the YJ, but as long as we can get through most of our usual trails, it will still be a Moab adventure. And Richard has a great long-term shop project to alleviate his stress the way gardening does for me. Just not yet, because right now we're dry-walling and landscaping and the temporary YJ has to be running in 4 weeks!

Yesterday morning I was eating my breakfast in front of the kitchen windows when I noticed two black birds (sparrows? starlings?) come fluttering around under my eaves. They spooked when they saw me through the glass. I saw twigs and thought, oh no, they're going to nest under my eaves. In a second I was out my back door to check, but there wasn't any sign of a nest. Back inside, I moved to a different vantage point where I suddenly noticed more twigs, sticking out the back corner of my barbecue. Hm. My slow brain goes back to Tuesday, when I cleaned a few strands of garden debris out of the BBQ when I made lunch, and believing the only openings were slits too small even for rodents, had chalked it up to the last windstorm. I went outside again to pull the twigs from the back just as the birds arrived again and aborted a BBQ landing! I opened the lid, and saw this....

I snapped this pic with my iPhone and sent it off to Richard, because my text message didn't do it justice. He was so shocked he phoned me back. When I got home at lunch, I had to take the grills, pans and elements out in order to get several dustpans worth of dried leaves, twigs, and some construction waste from my yard out of my barbecue! And then I fired it up to 600 degrees to bake off the bird poop for 15 minutes before I made lunch. God I hope that was long enough. Ew.

I left the lid up so it doesn't look so appealing as a nest, and I cooked meat on it so the smell might deter them (does pork and bell peppers grilled with chili powder, cumin and garlic smell like predator or food to a small bird, do you think?) but I know, as soon as I have to put that lid down - assuming we FINALLY get some rain this spring - they're moving in. If it's not field mice in my house and pocket gophers in my flower beds, it's birds. Sigh. I prefer Llamavision. Or if it has to be birds, give me hawks and owls. Those horned owls that nested across the street in 2005 just love cocky little birds and rodents. We never had these problems when the owls lived in the neighbourhood, but with all the trees dying and being chopped down, where's a bird to go? My yard, great. But don't mess with my BBQ!

Here are a few photos of our progress in the basement. Okay, more than a few. I’ve included all the main rooms (except the bathroom and mechanical room which we aren’t working on yet), focusing on the main family room area facing the fireplace, so you can see the transformation since the original photo from September, 2004 when Richard and I first put the offer on the house. The next image after the original shows the gutted space with the first framed wall and new electrical panel in the summer of 2005. With projects over the years being small and intermittent, I find I don’t have very many photos between that first summer and this year’s major push. The rest of these are since January of this year.

The photo here at left looks out towards the basement entrance (north) from beside the fireplace, which corresponds upstairs to the entrance to my office, looking out to the deck through our French doors. You can see the drywall challenges posed by the various ducting bulkheads, so I’m very happy to report that we’ve found the perfect professional mudder/taper, Marjorie, who will get to work as soon as Richard and I finish the remaining boarding.

You’ll see in the final images that we still have half of the west and north walls and the north edge of the ceiling to cover. And the sides of lots of bulkheads. We only got the lower walls of the laundry room and guest room done this Saturday, and one more ceiling board up in the main room, but Richard got some key wiring and plumbing issues sorted out, and I got our boxes and piles of construction materials, tools, and storage items put away elsewhere. Hopefully we’ll finish up by the first weekend in May for the mudder/taper to do her thing the following week. And then we can call up the EcoEnergy people for our final evaluation, and get in line for our big fat rebate cheque!

Next on the basement to do list are the plumbing and fixtures for the bathroom, mechanical room, and storage-turned-laundry room; flooring, which will be tile throughout; lighting, halogen pot lights on dimmer switches which are wired and ready to install after painting; and of course painting and moulding. That’s a big list and we’ve got a teeny budget right now, so don’t expect to see furnished rooms any time soon! But already it’s warmer, brighter, cleaner, and so much easier now to visualize our plans for the space that I no longer dread going downstairs. Whether or not we get any further this spring than the drywall stage, I’m looking forward to showing it off to our guests in August. And here, of course. It’s been ages since I last had anything to post under the title “Playing House”!

Like the mice that have been slowly but surely chewing their way into our house season after season (yup, just caught another one yesterday), we've been tackling our basement transformations little by little since Richard gutted it back in October of 2004.

With help from Chris, Jason, and Rick, the gas lines, ducting and framing were done back in '05 and '07 between other more urgent projects. Last September Richard finished the wiring and most of the plumbing, and the heating system got its final upgrade with the geothermal installation in December. Finally this January, the looming deadline of our final EcoEnergy evaluation lit a fire under Richard to get the basement to the drywall stage.

It's taken him just about every Saturday since then to finish the plumbing, ducting, insulation, vapour barrier, etc. He even had to relocate the laundry in what was to be the storage room, because he couldn't get the venting for the dryer to work within the plan for our ensuite bathroom. (I'm pleased with the result, actually, because this way I get more of a counter and a full-size laundry sink, and after 5 years hell I'm used to the stairs.) Every project seems to have at least one snag like that which makes it take longer than you'd expect, so I was really relieved when our EcoEnergy evaluator was able to get us an extension past our April 6th deadline. I admit though, I was tempted not to tell Richard we got it, for fear he'd spend the long weekend on the couch!

I shouldn't have worried; his momentum had been building as the walls filled in with insulation and the vapour barrier gave everything a unified surface. Suddenly we have rooms! Despite not having friends or family up to help over Easter, the way we usually do, the two of us found the energy to spend every minute of daylight hanging drywall for 3 days straight. For me, I'm motivated to get this out of the way so I can return to gardening. I had originally planned to spend the long weekend in the yard, but the universe shoved me in the right direction by sending a fresh bout of winter weather - it even snowed yesterday morning! So the garden can wait.

As I write, Richard is trying to find more of that energy to get down there so we can finish it up today. The boarding, I mean. We're still hoping we can find a mudder/taper with professional skills and not so outrageous prices to do the finishing for us in a week or two. The quote we got last night was absolutely ridiculous! I need to get us moving, no time for photo editing, so look for the pics of our progress later. High ho, high ho....