They say that whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Well, we got a little bit stronger today. We had been waiting for Bruce, the drywall guy.. to come up and do a "board count" so he could order the drywall to be delivered up to the house. This is the last step prior to the crew coming and putting it all on the walls. We passed Bruce on his way out when we were on our way home last night. He had been up and done what he needed to and told us the drywall would be delivered in the morning on Friday. Yay! We had to quickly rearrange stuff in the house to accommodate the 12 and 14 foot long boards that the professional drywallers use. Friday was also the day that the laminate flooring we liked at Rona was going on a "buy 2, get 1 free" sale - a substantial saving. I took the truck in to work, opened up the office and then left Loni in charge for the day while I went to pick up the flooring and underpad. Tobi at Rona looked after me quickly, and I loaded more than a ton of "spalted maple" flooring into the back of the truck and headed up the hill to our place. It was a beautiful day, with lots of sunshine and warm temps (13*C in town). The road was quite sloppy as most of the snow and ice was melting, forming rivers of muddy runoff in the ditches. As I drove into the first part of our 2km driveway, it quickly became apparent that something big had been on our road. It must be the drywall delivery truck! Hoping not to meet it going in the opposite direction, I carried on up through the snowy and sometimes icy mess that is our driveway. The big tires of the crane truck they use to unload the heavy drywall boards had made significant tracks along the way with several areas where they obviously were slightly off the main part of the road. About 300 metres below the house, on a part where you still can't see that there is a house ahead, there was an obvious "oops". The tracks fell off into the ditch and there had been much futzing around to get them back onto the road....and then the tracks ended! OMG, they got all this way up, within a couple of hundred metres of the house, and then stopped and went back! Yikes!
After arriving home, Carol didn't even realize that they had been just out of sight, around the little curve in the driveway. Shortly after, Bruce called with the obvious news. The delivery truck had been stuck for several hours and had broken a set of tire chains trying to get in. They were, not surprisingly, pissed and told Bruce that they wouldn't make another attempt until we had something plow the driveway completely clean and flat. That was not going to happen with our little tractor so we would have to come up with another plan.
As you know, we had tried to get the gravel guys up a couple of weeks ago only to be thwarted by the load restrictions on the soft roads. It seems that you have such a short window of opportunity with all this stuff and you have to walk a fine line to get it all done when you want/need it done. We'll think about it for a day or two and then decide what to do.
For now, all we could do was unload all the flooring stuff into the basement. I will work on the downstairs bathroom and some of the electrical finishing. I have lots of lights, plugs and switches to install. The extra tile for the bathroom floor had arrived last week so that can be another weekend project. And, of course, we need wood....lots of wood....lots and lots of wood.
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