September...yikes!

Looking at the calendar, I notice that it reads, "September 5, 2012". We've been living in the house now for just over a year. It's hard to believe that a whole year has passed since Carol's parents visited late last summer. Inside the house is dramatically different with insulation, walls, flooring, a kitchen and two bathrooms all looking much like the finished versions we had in our minds' eye. Our electrical and water systems are pretty much finalized with just the basement and exterior lighting left finish. The mechanical room is looking pretty good with everything organized per the inspector's report.




We are slowly reducing the piles of "stuff to be installed" and getting some of the boxes of personal items put away in their new homes.
Outside, it's still a different story. The siding we were hoping to finish by the end of August is, of course, taking much longer than I first anticipated. Don't get me wrong, it's coming along nicely now, but it will be another month before we have it all done.




Where the siding is up the house is looking really nice. Finally, we are managing to hide the Tyvek house wrap under our Autumn Red fibre cement Certainteed siding. It goes up quite quickly but slows down around all the items that interrupt the clean expanse of the walls - stuff like windows, doors, vents, faucets, and outlet boxes. Since we have 19 windows, 3 doors, 5 vents, 4 outlets, 2 taps and a couple of conduit entrances, the installation goes "slowly," if I have to choose a word. Before they are nailed to the wall, the siding boards are easily broken if not handled properly. 



Compounding that concern is all the cutting and manipulating that has to happen to go around all the aforementioned obstructions. Tedious and fiddly work, this satisfying the Building Code! As I said earlier though, the place is starting to look good!
I have to get my butt in gear. We're running out of warm weather (not this week though, with highs forecast to hover just below 30*C) and I will soon have to focus on our firewood supply. Some good news on that front is that we should have our direct vent propane space heaters installed by the end of next week, courtesy of Fred and his team at CalGas.

That will take some of the pressure off our wood stove this winter and allow us to leave the place for more than a few hours without fear of freezing up all the pipes. We will use more propane with these in place but if you consider that we have only used about a third of our tank over the last 11 months, that should not be a big problem.