primed for some...
..whatever.
For those who read this for the house news: there is light. We snooped again yesterday. Sunday seems to be the quasi-ultimate day of rest. Sometimes they work. Sometimes there is peace. Yesterday there was peace, and we arrived at the abandonned worksite, clambered over the thawing muck, avoided little bit of wood, nails, and construction refuse everywhere around the perimeter. We toured our top floor for the first time. We took a small smattering of photos, though not nearly enough to please me. Time lingered and guests frettered.
For those who read this for the house news: there are stacks of shingles on the raw plywood roof, there is a three-step concrete porch, there are windows waiting for installation, there are bathroom bits starting to form where required by interest, there has sprouted a boxy little chimney high atop the interest spaces, there are frames and folds, there are doorways corners and nooks, there is a wooden rectangle to hold medicine cabinets, there are stairs and steps on multiple design. We have the shell of a house. We are excited.
09:28 AM on 28/02/2005 | comments (0) | trackbacks (0)
nearly photoless
I know. Out of character. No photos.
But we drove by the house last night (I having just picked up Karin from work and having had the day off myself) and there was a roof. Yes. A full roof. Frame and plywood and a light dusting of snow, shapes both geometic and house-like coming down along the gable-esque structures atop the garage and above the front door. It seems the framing is nearly complete, and in the interim, the house-"site" looks more and more akin to a livable-structure than a wild mass of wood and concrete reliant on an abstract imagination to fill in the gaps.
The rest is not related to the house and comes down to a mere mental reprogramming.
I've been meaning to write.
I woke up this morning at 6:25 AM.
I've been reading Cloud Atlas.
I watched nearly zero hours television last night.
I walked twelve kilometers yesterday and have the blisters to prove it.
I took an entire gallery of sepia-toned images.
I won Churchill.
I focussed.
I spawned a new mental concept and formulated an interesting plan of attack.
09:47 AM on 22/02/2005 | comments (1) | trackbacks (0)
Locked Out?
Another house update? Well, at least an external one.
We were in Red Deer this weekend -- yaddayaddayadda -- and swinging by the build site on the way back to the apartment we found the house sealed.
Sealed you ask?
It was bound to happen eventually. With windows installed AND sitting loose in the living room... With doors and floors and walls appearing everywhere... With busy little contruction dudes leaving their tools around and about... it all added up to half of a house with some locked doors, and of course, us in the lurch and peeking into our new windows.
The showhome was closed, but I don't think we would have gotten in regardless.
But that's how it goes: and I managed to snap a whole thwock of pictures before the sun disappeared and we took off to finish our trip back home.
08:15 PM on 13/02/2005 | comments (0) | trackbacks (0)
first floors?
You'll need to pardon my excitement. Karin and I stopped by the build site last night on our drive back from Calgary: we took the shortcut in, turning down Elerslie Road and piking up Terwilligar. From that angular sort-of vantage we could see something that hadn't been there before, even as late as Friday night. It was an odd sort of chill to drive down the the street that will soon be included in our address and to round the corner by the park (that will soon be "our park") look across the snow and see a little wooden structure blossoming from the landscape where every time before all there had been was space and mounds of frozen clay.
I had anticipated the construct, but seeing it there on the landscape was something else entirely. It was Sunday, late-afternoon, but still light enough to take decent photos. I had hoped to sneak onto the site, climb up onto our new floor and look at the wood shapes close-up. But there were five people working on it. Five. So we parked and walked by, inconspicuously snapping pics of the changes from across the roadway, then snuck round back to the end of the half-finished road to the west of us, and stole some pictures from a rear angle.
Progress. Ahh...
The plan, or so we were told, is to have the framers out by the end of the week. In essence, that means two floors, interior walls, and a roof. Something tells me that I'm going to be doing a lot of driving this week.
09:00 AM on 07/02/2005 | comments (0) | trackbacks (0)
finally some news?
So, betwixt the furstrations of having a ill-tempered website, a mess of chaos at the office, and innumerable little terrors mixing through the folds of my everyday existence, there has been the house. It seems that the bitterly cold weather of weeks past caught us up, and we spent a number of frustrating post-work and weekend trips to the site to look at a slowly progressing concrete hole.
When it rains, it pours: when it shines, the sky opens and heavenly light streams through the atmosphere. Work stabilized for a bit, the web-stuff is sorting out, and when Karin and I visited the house-site on Wednesday evening there were the makings of a floor. The framing has begun; And I imagine by the time we spin around this evening there may even be something resembling walls and stairs and other house-like structures built of the wooden bits now scattered around my future front yard.
Photos? Well, it was dark and we were being sneaky. The showhome was "barely open" so we went by without saying much. And far be it from me to terrorize my neighbors with bright flashing lights from my camera late into the evening. I'll save that for when I live there and have a house to duck into for protection.
09:03 AM on 04/02/2005 | comments (0) | trackbacks (0)
just another drive-by
I shot some more photos, you see.
As is now par for a Saturday, Karin and I took a drive down south to the build site to check out the house progress. Framing is schedualled for next week (according to our contractor) but it seems they had already been busy, and over the past week some crazy garage-work had been done. Piles, forms, electrical work -- it's starting to look like more than just a simple concrete box.
Additional to this, I uploaded a whole new stack of pictures to the gallery, of course. For those keeping track, that brings the running total up to thirty-seven snaps of the progress. Sweet!
11:01 PM on 22/01/2005 | comments (0) | trackbacks (0)
pings
We sounded out the meetings yesterday: fortunately none of them were three hours long.
The first meeting of the day had more to do with computers and databases and volunteering that I'm doing and less to do with the house. But, the developer and I had a conversation that went something like this (after I mentioned to Susan that I had a house meeting shortly thereafter):
"Oh, you're building a house. My wife and I just built a house last year."
"Yeah. It's just a hole in the ground with some concrete -- at the moment. You know..."
"Where are you building?"
I told him. "The Riverbend area. Riverside."
"I live in in Riverside." He grinned. "Do you know that big park? I back onto that. Well, my neighbor backs onto it, but the kids just walk along the fence into the park, well..."
"We're just down the street fromt he showhome, there."
"Really? We're just about neighbors. My kitchen window looks across at those showhomes."
And then we did some real work.
Part Two
The second meeting was oddly engaging. We are apparently the casual-customers. That is, we're not crazy and demanding -- and the showhome folks like it when we drop by. They made sure it was okay, of course, but they wanted to know if they could use our contractor meeting as a quasi-training session: rather than a salesman, contractor, and purchasers meeting, we had a salesman, sales assistant, contractor, contractor-in-training, and purchasers meeting. It made for a cozy fit around the little table.
The gist of it was:
(a) Wink wink -- don't go around the site when people are working. It's dangerous, and if you fall in the hole or get a load of shingles dropped on your head, well, we told you so...
(b) Who the heck scribbled all these weird notes all over your blueprints? The sales-dude? Oh, that explains it.
(c) Don't freak out at what the house looks like UNTIL you move in. It will look perfectly nice on that day, until which time we are still building and cleaning and honing -- and after which time your mess is your problem.
There are still some schedualling backups because of last week's bone-chilling weather. The framing is actually (factually) schedualled and booked. There are less-apparent things to be done on the site before that time: our contractor, Miles, mentioned something about piles and safety-stuff that are due sometime this week, I think.
It's a big ol'complicated process, but it seems we're in competent hands. So yeah... w00t!w00t!
09:44 AM on 18/01/2005 | comments (0) | trackbacks (0)
harassing the locals
It was Saturday, so again Karin and I found ourselves out for a highly directed drive southwards. Of course, we stopped by the build site. The recent cold weather didn't disappoint my expectations that not much had been done. We lingered for a while, scared off some eager couples scouting out the neighborhood, and took more photos. As it is, our next drop-in session to the neighborhood will be the super-mega-very official visit: the first of the schedualled construction meetings with the contractor. Since we figured that we'd need to spend three hours stewing in uncomfortable chairs looking over blueprints on Monday again (and they hadn't done anything but drop off lumber at the site anyhow) we avoided the showhome like the plague and instead drove to the nearby neighborhood of Terwilligar Towne to look at the showhomes there. We lurked a little, then poked our nose in some houses that we hadn't bothered scoping before because they weren't the style we were looking at. They all start to blend together after a while, anyhow. In one, Karin fibbed and pretended we were green, letting the dude in that random house give us the sales-pitch and tell us about how great and economical his company would be for a classy young couple like us. I think he would have been more convincing if I had liked the house better. I think Karin would have been more convincing had she not kept shooting me sly, grinning glances over her shoulder -- and were I not thumbing my camera in my pocket, the same camera that had a whole stack of photos of our new home, an actual chunk of concrete not four blocks away and across the road. Slightly deceptive, yes. Am I worried? Not particularly.
11:52 PM on 15/01/2005 | comments (0) | trackbacks (0)
reving up for new year's things
It's been cold here for the last few days. Today, with a minus forty-one celcius wind-chill at one low-point in the day, I couldn't help feeling a bit sorry for all those blokes out on the south-end building houses. Outside. In the cold, cold air.
Yesterday, Autumn called to set up our "pre-constuction" meeting. Apparently it's called a "pre" construction meeting because construction doesn't really begin until all that messy, basic-foundation work is done. Or something. Really, it's just the builder's way of making you feel involved while at the same time making it blisteringly clear that the implied pre-constuction phase is more of a pre-come-see-but-don't-touch phase, and for crying-out-loud we know what we're doing so just-leave-us-alone, we'll work-on-our-own schedual-phase. And that foundation thing, it seems to be wrapping up.
Again, despite the cold weather and the haunting notion that I know I wouldn't want to be outside today, I checked the build site after work and discovered that not only had the concrete been inspected, but someone had backfilled around the house and did some basic grading out front. For example, you can wander over to the gallery and check out the sweet little level patch where my future garage is going to be. You might also notice the little slope up to the front step where the sidewalk will wrap around the side of the garage, take a single step up about half-way in, and eventually lead to one of those prefab concrete staircases into the front door. Ah! Just think. next year around this time I'll be writing to complain about shovelling that exact spot. In other words, I'll shovel it about half-way then have a pre-snow removal meeting to discuss the progress.
It was so cold... (How cold was it?) It was so cold that I hopped out of the truck to snap some pictures and only managed to click the shutter off six times before my fingers started to seize-up. If you know me, you also know that six pictures is like saying I took twelve steps out of the truck. It was cold. Did I mention that? And for one brief, ice-crystallizing second I felt some compassion for the dudes who would need to be wandering around that exact spot hammering floor-joists -- or whatever might be the next step. Then, I started worrying about my camera and its potential reaction to the weather... so I got back in the truck and drove away.
You may also notice in the gallery a photo of some building bits laying out at the front of the lot. I seem to recall from looking at other semi-built houses int he area that when building a house with a garage (Brett and Lenore's chronicle is absolutely useless for speculation here) they need to put some pilings under the garage, and then eventually build a little concrete frame for that, too. It doesn't go deep -- as last time I checked, my garage won't have a basement -- but concrete seems to be the basic fusion element between soil and wood, so I suspect the big-ol'truck will be bback to visit some day soon. I did see some wood and rebar again. I imagine the little strips of white foam have something to do with that too. Who can say?
My last observation, driving away from the build site (all the while slowly beginning to warm up a wee little bit) was that in front of the next-door empty-lot there was some window bucks, rebar, and wood bits. Based on my idle calculations (and those photos of our progress I took about thirty days ago) it would seem that construction next door is proceeding as well, only about a month behind us. Ha ha! We win. I don't imagine that big pile of frozen clay is helping things either. Not a good way to impress the neighbors:
"Hey dude, get your clay off my lawn!"
"What lawn? You don't even have a house!"
05:37 PM on 12/01/2005 | comments (0) | trackbacks (0)
post christmas
I'm thinking I might take a post-christmas sabatical from this whole blog thing. Just getting a little tired of it, and I want to direct some of that energy to other things. We'll see. I'm still going to keep up the house updates -- things like adding photos of our new basement walls here and in the gallery -- and maybe post some sporadic updates about the other projects I'm working on. But for now... well, I'm just putting myself out there and the reaction has been mixed. I need to think on that a while.
02:37 PM on 30/12/2004 | comments (0) | trackbacks (0)
go...
Apparently, if I don't explicitly write it out here, no one bothers to go hunting for it themselves. Mom gave me the (metaphorical) gears last night because while I had posted a couple updated pics in the gallery (including this one taken yesterday of someone digging a big hole on our lot) I really just ran out of time and didn't have an opportunity to wax poetic about it here. I'll try harder in the future, to avoid any possible confusion.
So yeah.
While building a house (and thoughts thereof) consume most of my free energy, this blog has become (at least for the moments while the initial construction begins) the house-blog. Of course, you could just bookmark the house category page and avoid all that distracting filler that may pop up between house entries over the next few months.
My three visits to the lot (or as I should now call it, "site") over a twenty-four hour period include:
a) Alice discovers the Rabbit Hole wherein after a scrumptious dinner with our grandmother, we adventured down in the dark of late evening and spied not only a pile of dirt, but the significant startings of a house-shaped hole.
b) Neo stick his finger in the mirror goo wherein I drop Karin at work on my day off, and coffee in hand, check out the backhoe in operation shortly before nine in the morning. Photos are taken.
c) Curiosity leaves the boring old real world behind wherein Karin and I stop by the site after I pick her up from her office and discover an entire crew of folks and machinery pouring cement and starting the footings of our new house. No photos. Yet. It might have been rude.
So yeah.
It's coming along. The adventure has really begun. For us. Whatever. If you are really impatient, and looking for more house-fun you could check out bnlhouse.ca where Brett and Lenore chronicled their construction -- or you could visit it had Brett not switched his server off at the moment. That's too bad.
Whatever.
House! Hahahaha....
Okay. Now I'm just giddy. I'll stop now.
08:30 AM on 18/12/2004 | comments (0) | trackbacks (0)
ready.. set..
I was a little ill yesterday. I won't go into the pathetic details, but it may have something to do with swallowing too much pool water at West Edmonton Mall, or eating all that KFC for lunch that same day. Long story short: my agony and inability to stand up yesterday morning -- that same agony that prevented me from going to work -- had pretty much faded to a dull rumbling and growing restlessness by mid-afternoon. As such, I decided to take myself out for some air, and drove down to visit our lot. Interestingly enough, someone had staked it, and dropped a small collection of building supplies -- things like rebar and bucks (and of course there are more in the gallery) -- at the edge of the road. In about four months, a pile of rebar and two-by-fours at the end of my driveway would be a bit of afternoon angst. However, since said driveway does not yet exist, and the supplies will in fact lead to its eventual creation, it was more of an exciting sight that anything. I predict by my next visit there may be even more progress -- perhaps even a big hole.
09:16 AM on 14/12/2004 | comments (0) | trackbacks (0)
end in sight?
I suppose I should have read over the papers a little more carefully. Lenore is going to be very disappointed that she had to read this here rather than, say, hearing it in person in the car as I may have read it last night. We could have been driving away from the showhome, as we happened to be, glancing through our copy of the consolidation agreement for our house, freshly retrieved. We could have noticed that in addition to the extra signatures there was an interesting date hand-scribbled, noted in the middle of some random paragraph.
Karin discovered it later, a tentative completion date. Not that there's even a hole yet. Not that there is anything but cold weather, snow, wind, and dirt. But the builder seems to think we'll have our house by April 5th.
08:55 AM on 09/12/2004 | comments (0) | trackbacks (0)
snow and house
Those not living in this fair province will perhaps neither know nor care that early Saturday morning the wind pulled an icy blanket of air across the land and the white-stuff began to fall. It is December, though, and most people's response was a generous "about damn time" reply.
We drove to Red Deer. And decided to stop by the lot to:
(a) Get some pictures of ourselves in front of the "sold" sign. Karin snapped a blurry picture of me: probably my fault it was blurry because I had both turned off the flash and also been shivering in the blustering wind. Her pose was a little more illuminated, though her eyes are wincing at the snowfall.
(b) Unofficially time the race from our new home to Red Deer where the folks live. The clock told us ninety minutes in a snowstorm. Most impressive. I suppose it helps that we're on the south-ish end of the city now.
09:41 AM on 06/12/2004 | comments (0) | trackbacks (0)
consolidation and such
It had been just over two weeks since we dropped by to check out our future home: perhaps a long wait, but what's there to look at, really? An empty lot and a showhome we'd perused over two-hundred times. But it was all good: the papers were ready for a signature and a cheque, and we giddily supplied both. The next step: hole-ness.
Dad and Mom even showed up with a birthday/consolidation present -- a laser-guided circular power saw that will come in super-handy when I start constructing things in and around the house next summer: fences, decks, workbenches for the garage, rooms in the basement, a studio... hmm... all the potential.
But then... now and again... we wait. It seems I'm always just eager to jump to the next step. And then once it has leaped past, anticipation for continuance. I thought I'd be gleed when we paid and that was done: now I want to see ground broken. Break ground! Break it! AHHHHH!
02:02 PM on 29/11/2004 | comments (2) | trackbacks (0)
what do you want?
So the house thing is temporarily stalled. In a way... but then again, not really. That little jaunt we took out of the country sped some things up at the front end, pushing some paperwork forward. Unfortunately, some other paperwork couldn't keep up. It's still lagging. Hopefully, we'll be making an appointment to go do the last final big ol'signing tonight. That would be cool.
And speaking of cool, guess what is holding up the whole works: our refridgerator. It turns out that the cost of our new house includes a stack of brand new appliances. There was just one catch: some of the upgrades are not neccessarily "upgrades" in the eyes of fickle people like us. The default refridgerator, as much as it sounds like a meandering moot point, was a side-by-side model, the kind where the doors to the freezer and the fridge-proper are side-by-side instead of top bottom. Karin didn't want that: something about too much maintenance, and too narrow of freezer. No big deal: they will do the switch, adjusting the price up or down based on our alternative selection.
But now the blueprints are done and signed. The city has approved our build. The colors are picked. The lot is ready. A big ol'cheque is sitting in my wallet (unsigned of course) and nearly ready to be passed over to the proper authorities. But one thing is missing: the price of our fridge.
So we hang. And wait. And nothing really exciting will happen until GE tells Jayman an exacting value for modern cold storage. Strange as that sounds, our fridge is slowing us down. Sigh.
But maybe -- fingers crossed -- today will be the BIG day. Maybe. And then I'll have something more interesting to take photos of than an empty lot.
11:59 AM on 25/11/2004 | comments (0) | trackbacks (0)
tip-toeing towards it
It had been about eight or nine days since we visited the lot slash neighborhood slash showhome slash builder, so we dropped by on Saturday for a push-things-along visit.
Progress is fleeting, though only from our anxious perspective.
Apparently much is going on behind the scenes. Our blueprints are complete and in transit to the showhome, those last few papers are being polished for our signature and the staple for our big cheque, and the last few dabs of color, wood, and light are being orchestrated in the fragments of conceptual imagination.
Things are coming together. Then what? This week we sign. Next week they approve, and then soon, ideas start to become reality: stakes will be planted, holes will be dug, forms will be built, concrete will be poured -- and most certainly photos will be snapped.
I just thought you might like to know.
12:33 PM on 08/11/2004 | comments (0) | trackbacks (0)
wood, metal, and... leather?
Appointments are suddenly common-place. It seems that a significant portion of the process of building a home involves spending time with the minutae, festering details, and selecting from the narrow range of choices that define each. "Here are your options. Choose one. Move along."
For example, yesterday afternoon we chose cabinets. I took nearly an hour off from work, picked up Karin, and we drove to the south end of the city to look at miniature versions of wood panelling that in some small and moderately abstract way reprsents both something that we've already bought, and something I would have never before considered thinking about -- and therefore know little about (apart from practical experience). Imagine me, standing in a cabinetry showroow, fondling little brushed chrome, nickel, steel handles and knobs -- in some perverse way trying to figure out which design (a) "suits our personality" and more importantly (b) predictably will not annoy me for ten years when I'm cleaning, repairing, modifying, or simply just using them.
It's bizaare.
We, of course, visited the showhome shortly afterwards and projected abstract memories of vague selections overtop the realities of concrete examples. It sounds easier than it really is.
And then things themselves get a little more finely detailed. We spent ten minutes with Steve, the sales guy, pondering a mental checklist of random building nuggets. The conversation prompted him to give us a short VHS tape (12 minutes of sugar-coated house construction details), a refridgerator magnet checklist (for real checking-fun) and a groovy leather briefcase with our builder's logo splashed across the front (in case we forget to whom we gave all that money).
And ultimately, a vacant lot was meandered once again, neighbors were introduced by casual happenstance, timelines were filed with some rare certainty, and uncountable fine resolutions were brushed carefully across the perceptions of our minds. Oddly enough, some of this actually makes sense. Oddly enough, abstractions in raw materials seem less floundering as each day drips by.
10:40 AM on 28/10/2004 | comments (0) | trackbacks (0)
layers of colour
We spent a whirlwind Saturday morning at the light store. The light store was, oddly enough, intense. And I simply have no other way to describe it.
Imagine a store that opens at 9AM, and us with our silly little 9AM appointment expecting to be the lone car sitting in the lot waiting like eager little kids on Halloween to pounce when the neon light burns up and someone appears to unlock the glass doors. We were not alone. In fact, despite hopping from the car seconds after the OPEN sign lit, we were among the second dozen people to clamber into the shop. And we're not talking IKEA here; this is a little corner light shop. Selling lamps. Bulbs. Chandeliers.
Not exactly what I would expect on an early Saturday morning.
To top off the fun of pushing our way to the counter to check in for our appointmnet, it was quickly discovered that our "consultant" had just found out that her Grandmother had passed away. I have all the sympathy in the world. It's just an odd thing to deal with as one excitedly contemplates the joys of halogen lighting.
This, officially, means we're roughly half done slecting colours and flooring, and wood grains to match our bizaare personalities. I don't have much in the way of images from these adventures, so what I do have I'll share one fragment at a time. Cope.
11:38 AM on 25/10/2004 | comments (0) | trackbacks (0)
in living colour
Somewhere along the line we needed to contemplate colours. The weird thing about the whole process is that it involves these microscopic color swatches and a whole lot of imagination. Imagine this: an entire house. Now picture it covered in the following two colours:
Oddly enough, if you type either of those two colour words into Google Image Search, you'll get a selection of images that have nothing, whatsoever, to do with the swatches represented above.
Back on topic, we were handed a loaf of vinyl siding swatches and an additional loaf of little tin cards -- and told that some combination of those loafs would represent the mirage we would arrive home to everyday for the next decade or so.
Imagination. How powerful is your imagination?
We have marginally agreed that we both like this color combination. It's a start. It's a beginning. It's something to build off, from, and into the wild blue yonder. For now. But it still boggles me that these quasi-important perceptions of the moment will define something so permanent.
01:58 PM on 13/10/2004 | comments (2) | trackbacks (0)
pre-build teasers
It seems more of you are interested in THE PROJECT than I anticipated. I suppose it beats the endless filosofizing and melodrama with which I would otherwise fill these virtual pages. And of course, the last thing I want to turn this building story into is a filosofize-ed-melloo-dram-tic diatribe on the medeocre efforts of paying someone to build us a house.
It's an effort, but not THAT much of one.
In fact, I would dare to suggest that it is generally very amusing and deeply exciting -- for me, at least -- and as such deserves to be spoken of and written of with careful reverence, or something otherwise approaching careful disclosure. Nevertheless, I'll try and break it up a little bit in hopes that it gets neither so monotonous nor lacking -- which it might do if I risk running out of material. It's a risk, and especially after attending (count) three turkey-roasts this weekend where the house-topic popped up on occasion; I don't want to sound like a scrambled MP3 file -- or an audio analogy approaching the modern equivalent of a broken record.
So, for example, the floor plan: one main floor and one top floor modified as we're building. The original, of course, belongs to Jayman and I'm probably breaking a half-dozen copyrights and contractual agreements by modifying and posting them here, so I'll give them full credit and hope I don't receive an angry letter from some lawyer for doing so. They are on Jayman's site to download, anyhow.
Jayman Jayman Jayman -- There. And three makes five links. That should make someone happpy.
Moderately disappointed, Melanie writes : "So you would have been our neighbours!!! And we went and moved before you got in.... "
True. Terwilligar is quite close. Yes, we nearly could have thrown rocks at your old place from our new one. Not that we would have of couse -- it's just a really bizaare and (unfortunately) nasty figure of speech. Ah, well. At least you know where we live, now.
And maybe, someday soon, I'll post something concrete: like foundation pictures. (Smirk: Get it? Concrete? Get it? Wink! Wink!)
01:15 PM on 12/10/2004 | comments (0) | trackbacks (0)
oddly enough : day one
I have a feeling that until this whole concept settles in my mind a little further, I'm going to have lots to say about the new "project" and events surrounding it. It's funny how, upon making that transition from prospective homeowner to, as the legalese puts it, The Purchaser one's very thoughts and patterns of concern suddenly swing into more "constructive" matters.
For example, I spent my lunch break at the hardware store a few blocks away from my office. Suddenly rows upon rows of finishing supplies are interesting and consuming. I never would have thought I could be vagely concerned with looking at paint cards or arborite samples -- but suddenly, given the choice between Best Buy and rows of DVDs -- or Home Depot and countertop finishes -- well, I plead no-contest. It's a shoe-in for the home-renovating, because apparently it's where I've decided to spend my money for (at least) the next twenty-five years. It's also dull to everyone but Karin and I.
And that could be a problem.
Another (boring) example is brought up the issue of framing. When we were still scoping and plotting, Dad had mentioned that apparently sixteen inch on center framing was better than twenty-four inch on center framing. Initally, I had no idea what he was even talking about. You mean I have to know how many two-by-fours are in my WALLS! Simply put: Hallelujah for Google. While I'm sure there are things that are not fully explainable via the internet, I did find a number of quote-interesting-unquote resources touting not-only the environmental efficiency of using less lumber in one's house, but also a number of references to energy efficiency, load-bearing strength, wall-thickness, and drywall crack-resistence in relation to the newer standard. It's absolutely amazing how one can use a fifteen minute break to dig up completely esoteric information and bore one's website audience. I almost never would have thought it possible.
Again, it could be a potential problem.
One -- perhaps interesting -- thought did cross my mind: It was that the house requires a good name. And a logo. Maybe even a theme song. Well -- okay -- maybe just a good name. I tried explaining this to Karin (who, consequently, thoroughly enjoys the work of one LM Montgomery) that Anne of Green Gables would have just been Anne, The Red Haired Brat Who Lives in That Green-Trimmed Farmhouse at the End of the Lane if her house didn't have a good name. I mean, names and such are important stuff. Imagine how much more impressive it would sound to say "I'm spending the holidays at One-Whippet Manor" rather than telling people "I'm doing Christmas at my parent's house." It's degrees more impressive. To me, at least.
And that could be a problem, also.
So to avoid any confusion in the future: yes, there will be substantial house-talk here. It's unavoidable. It's "the project." It's how we're spending the next six months of our life. It's a BIG thing. Big. Just tell me to shut up if I get annoying.
03:17 PM on 07/10/2004 | comments (1)
lots shots
And there you go. Huh. How anti-climactic. Karin, still stressed, can relax for a little while. Or maybe... hmmm... more? I guess this is just the start of the whole thing. A big pile of dirt: our very own.
That done, we wandered the site of our now-official future home, and took the first of what is sure to be many many pictures as we build and live...
For Sale? Wha'choo talkin' about...? How about SOLD!
09:10 PM on 06/10/2004 | comments (1)
day 0 (null, aught, zot, nada)
It begins with a cough. Fatigue. Confusion, and concern. Karin has been sick, and my sleep has been either disjointed or consuming. The two are not directly related.
It's day zero today. Conception and creation. We have an appointment to make things more official than they ever should perhaps be. And that is the edge of uncertainty and hesitation in my otherwise glorious high. Stephen, aus Deutschland, schreibt: "Wow, a house!" -- upon which the chain of events leading up to this evening and something big and scary called a deposit happens.
Papers are to be signed.
Images -- most definitely images -- will be captured of lots, and shadows falling across broken bits of dirt and lumber.
Hands shaken. Deals struck. Pages printed. Appointments plotted. Numbers discretely passed like they are the dirty words in fairy tale.
And then. Then. Then... well.
I should avoid turning this into a sporadic thought-stream, rippling with emotionally charged words. I should really avoid that -- even though it might be too late already. Karin and I are going to spend a medium-sized fraction of our money this evening. Forget life for a moment. Forget classes, work, volunteering, and the fact I spent most of my evening last night at the gym teaching my sister how to set up a quick and dirty training circuit. Forget all those things. There is something so much more enduring about building a home. Like, digging in or something.
I was in Vancouver this past weekend. (Well, Richmond, actually. I never made it to Vancouver-proper. Flew in and out for a conference, had a few beers, shook a few hands, and gave a few presentations where I stood up and explained my wacky existence.) Besides reminding me how good and how bad the sushi and the traffic are -- respectively -- I found myself in an airline window seat both ways. I swooped down over my old coastal home, and I picked out my old apartment from the sky over Burnaby. I located my old office amongst the scatter of uptown buildings. It felt familiar. But it was still so foreign.
On my way home, we slid under a thin layer of clouds and the south-west corner of Edmonton materialized out of my window. From the air I could locate large, familiar landmarks, narrow down locations relative, and eventually pinpoint an approximate circle of land that contains an even smaller uneven rectangle of land with our names on it. Saved. Held. Waiting for something bigger to happen, maybe.
That felt kind of funny. That's where I'm going to live, I thought. Odd. And now: day zero. Zero.
09:26 AM on 06/10/2004 | comments (0)
little house on the prairie
I've contemplated something.
But, I'm not sure: significant things demand significant attention. And I'm not sure if, in this case, significant attention requires something as significant as it's own website. I mean, after all, Brett and Lenore did it. They took the plunge. They tried to orchestrate their own little construction in the midst of a larger one.
A decision is immenent: I pondered it a little, even stretching to consider a domain name fitting for the grand event. But I think, perhaps, that this -- here -- is where this site becomes more interesting. And so, simply, I'll avoid the tangled distractions of yet another website, and focus my energies here. And begin the bold story of another, less abstract garden, somewhere in a little prairie town called Edmonton.
Thus: a new theme... build and home. The story of the following, begins:
The city, it seems, has woven us a step deeper into it's patterns. It hasn't consumed us, but rather than rootless waifs dancing across its surface, we are setting tendrils and finding our place. Last night, amidst a flury of random emotions, we started a "file."
Oh, it's not a big file. It's just a thin little legal-sized pile of documents. But it's our file, with our names on it, and some numbers that would be meaningless beyond the context of us. Last night we sat down, created some simple sheets of paper, tucked them away in the safe confines of something larger than anything we can imagine right now, and set a cascading snowball in motion that will ultimately lead to us orchestrating the chain of events. Those events, pending a million unsettled factors will -- in a few years time -- and stetching year imortal, find me standing in a small patch dirt, pulling weeds and tending the few little bits of life that etch themselves into some managable meaning between the tides of everything that makes us human. A lot, a yard, a block of cement that creates a drive leading up to a complex entangled structure, otherwise known as a house.
It's a frightening thing. Consuming. Yet, powerful. Fundamental. And, reassuring that everything is worth something. Eventually.
11:07 AM on 29/09/2004 | comments (0)
very moving
Without trying to stir speculation or pre-emptive expectations, I wanted to mention that Karin and I put a hold on an empty lot in the south-west corner of Edmonton this weekend. No obligation. No conditions. We just confirmed a location in the vast scheme of the house-building universe, and have nudged that project into the first stages of readiness. Imagine a huge boulder on the top of a very steep hill: we stuck a plank under the bottom edge of that boulder creating a lever-sort of contraption, and are preparing to take a very big jump at the other end. Roll, boulder, roll.
Ok. So that was a mediocre analogy. But give me a break. I'm tired.
In other news: life continues as required.
12:10 PM on 27/09/2004 | comments (0)