Gnus

So NB went to Vancouver and came back. We're both overworked and dead tired now. We have too many things to do before the vacation, and we haven't had a good night's sleep in what feels like years.

Now that there's been some rain, we've confirmed that there is a leak in the new sunroom. We've called the sunroom people and they said they'd send someone out to look at it sometime. I hope it's soon, because we're about halfway done the sunroom floor now, and would just like to finish the job and forget about it. But since water and wood don't mix, we have to wait until the leak is fixed.

Apart from the never-ending sunroom troubles, we also have other problems. It looks like our roof is deteriorating more than NB expected, so we have to start calling roofing people this week so that we can get it fixed as fast as possible. The garage is probably going to need replacing very soon because the roof is visibly sagging and the door will no longer close all the way. We're looking at a lot of repairs and renos in the next little while, which is a giant pain in the butt and expensive to boot. We're not happy. Oh, and the car has started making funny noises so we need to take it in (for the third time) before we go to BC.

We did get to lay a little more hardwood this weekend. Since some of the tools our friend lent us aren't actually his (and need to go back soon), we had to go and buy a compressor and brad nailgun. While we were out, we also got a bike rack. We tried out the new compressor on Sunday, and it seems to work nicely.

In addition to everything else, I've also had a setback with my tomatoes -- almost all of the ripening romas and the one ripening Jet Star have succumbed to blossom-end rot, while the tumbler tomatoes have funny blemishes on them (they look bug-related to me). It's very disappointing. At least the cucumber is still producing enormous fruit (bigger than the two of us can easily eat) and it looks like the banana pepper plant will give us a bumper crop of peppers.

So, that's the news from Edmontonia. I'm depressed just having to write it all out. :P But we have the Heritage Festival to look forward to, and we'll be celebrating our Yam-a-versary with a nice dinner out tonight. We're thinking of maybe buying a couple of yams at the supermarket, putting little hats on them, and taking them out to dinner with us. It seems appropriate for some reason.

Floor Photos

Saturday Night

This is what we got done on Saturday night. I took photos on Sunday morning because the light was better.





Sunday Night

And this is how it looked by the end of Sunday:




Once we got going, we really got some work done! Here's the cutout vent:

Flooring

NB and I started laying the hardwood last night. We ripped up the tar paper and the staples (I don't know how the tar paper was, but the little staples were pretty easy to remove). We're doing the tar paper as we go, now. We've got one strip down and we're covering it in hardwood.

So it's going well so far. We did about six rows last night. NB is putting the hardwood together and stapling it and I'm sawing the ends off. It's fun, at least for me. I'm starting to wonder whether I should get me a mitre saw and take up... I don't know. Sawing things.

Unfortunately, after laying about a box of hardwood last night, we realized that we'd miscalculated how much wood we'd need. We bought two extra boxes, but we're losing about a square foot and a half per box due to trimming, and it's likely that we'll use up part of the last box. So went back to Home Depot this morning to see if they had any boxes left. We found the pallet, but the colour we wanted was marked "All Sold". We asked whether the other stores might have some -- and luckily, they all did. We drove out to the 17th Street Home Depot to pick a couple extra boxes up.

When we got there, we discovered that the pallet was still up on the shelving, and would have to be taken down by forklift. The salesman helping us paged the Flooring Supervisor. We waited... and waited... and waited some more... finally, they managed to track down someone else who could use the forklift. We were almost embarrassed to have them take the whole pallet down just so we could buy two boxes.

Two hours after we left, we finally got our extra flooring home. We've opened up some of the other boxes and realized that the wood in those comes in slightly different lengths than the first box. NB is modifying his tiling program to tell us how to best tile our floor with a minimum of waste, and I'm just waiting around.

I should have some photos of the floor-in-progress to post later.

This Week's Trials

So, not much has happened in the past week. NB seems to be feeling better, after drinking copious amounts of tea. I think I may be coming down with whatever he had, but I still feel good enough to hope that it might pass me by.

We helped a friend move into a condo on Saturday, then went for Ukrainian food in the evening. On Sunday, we bought some asphalt felt to use as a moisture barrier for the floor in the sunroom. NB stapled it down Sunday afternoon. It's made the house smell like tar and was apparently unpleasant to work with. We made some chicken souvlaki and Greek salad on Sunday evening, and used home-grown cucumber (El Gordo -- nearly a foot long!) and home-grown oregano as ingredients. Sweeter Yet has turned out to be a very tasty and mild variety of slicing cucumber, although El Gordo started to get soft at the tip and we had to perform some surgery before we ate him. The other cucumber that has matured seems fine. We plan to eat it next week.

This morning we woke up and discovered that all the tar paper NB tacked down so carefully has buckled up in the night. We can't really put down hardwood on an uneven surface -- we're not sure what we ought to do next. Or rather, we're going to rip up all those staples next and remove the paper. We're just not sure what we'll do after that to keep it from buckling again.

Canada Day Weekend

The Canada Day long weekend has come and gone. NB and I went to the Legislature on Sunday to sit around and watch one of our friends race his bike. We kept trying to figure out which one he was -- it's surprisingly difficult to tell guys in sunglasses and helmets apart when they zoom past you. Eventually we recognized him going by (in the third race we watched), but he only lasted for about 15 minutes before he was lapped and dropped out. In the meantime, we lounged around in the shade and did lazy-people things (like reading and swatting mosquitoes). During one of the races, a rabbit hopped out onto the track right by us. Luckily, the pacing motorcycle scared it back onto the lawn, where it proceeded to have lunch in a bed of petunias.

We waffled about whether to go see the fireworks, but we didn't really feel like riding out again when the evening came.

Yesterday we went to look at floors for the sunroom. We stopped at Home Depot first, where we discovered that they had a couple of shipments of oak hardwood on sale for $3.29 per square foot. We went to look at the laminate, but most of it was more expensive and not as nice-looking as the oak. After looking everything over, including some terrifically ugly lino that was more than $5 per square foot, we decided that the oak was probably our best bet. We bought it in a nice burgundy-cherry sort of finish. We'll see how difficult it is to put it in ourselves -- we bought an extra couple of boxes in case we screw it up badly.

NB has come down with a sore throat, so he's staying home and drinking tea today. It seems to be going around.