2011/05 Family letter - Construction news |
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Construction news |
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Dear All,
This is our last news update before we head off for Alberta and Minnesota at the end of next week. We have friends visiting 
from Colorado and will be setting off on our trip shortly after they leave us. This letter’s getting written with pen and paper, in the hope that I’ll have time to get it onto the computer in the next few days. We’re currently camping at Silver Lake, close to Hope, giving the camper a check out before the big trip.
Spring has still been slow coming, but the flowers have arrived if later than usual. Our rhodos did especially well,
the trilliums less so, but I took this picture in of one in the woods by the river, with its flower just showing the first hint of its transition to a dark purple. These goldfinches were around for few days and probably continued on north.
When I wrote the last letter, I could barely move around the house as a result of a back injury. I’m happy to report that I’ve mostly recovered but still have problems bending, or maybe I’m just nervous. Recovery has been slow as I’m not a very good patient. I found early on that I could work OK standing up and stretching, so the basement ceiling project got finished; there’s still more to do in the basement, but we need another wall first, so that’ll be next winter. The worst part about the project was picking up dropped tools and screws!
I also found I could work quite well lying down. No jokes please. I mentioned last time that we’d had the power pole moved and just needed to get rid of the yellow bollards. I had no idea how I was going to do that. A concrete sawing company quoted $500 to bring out a saw and cut them off flush, but maybe they could do it for half that with an angle grinder. Aha, a way to do it! I picked up an angle grinder on sale for $20, bought a few grinding disks, and settled down on the driveway to grind my way through the bollard’s steel shell. It took me hours, but my time is cheap. Once all the steel was gone around the base, all it took was a few good whacks with a chisel to split the concrete. I made sure I was vertical for this as I didn’t want to be underneath the bollards; they weigh about 200 pounds each!
They lay there like felled trees until I was able to dig a pit and roll them in. 50 years from now someone will decide to plant a tree there and end up cursing me. Back in England I was planting a tree and found a surprisingly heavy piece of concrete in the way; I wasted a lot of energy before I found t
hat it was a 4 foot long curbstone buried on end. That stone is still there and the tree had to go somewhere else.
Up until then Sandie had to do all the digging, including the planting of the apple trees, and her share of distributing about 8 tons of topsoil, enough to cover the other side of our front yard. It gave her a break from working on quilts anyway. The one for our bed is almost done and she made the local newspaper for the one that the quilting club did for charity. This photo borrowed from the Hope Standard.