Tuesday 1 May 2012

Small Victories

 
I’m trying not to dwell on the ever increasing list of things that need doing and decided to celebrate those things that show that we’re making progress, however incremental. After the monumental milestone of installing the new dining room window, the next milestone was the installation of the new fireplace this weekend. Too bad we had a defective electronic control module so we couldn’t test it out. The guys who installed it also cleaned up some of the exposed gas lines on the outside of the house too.
Then, while Jean was away for a day teaching his seminar, I puttered around with levelling the floor in the Family Room with a maze of sleepers and shims. The next day, we ripped out the plywood subfloor between the basement stairs and kitchen, including dozens of pieces of wood of random thicknesses, to try to establish a new baseline to build up from. Not only did I manage to saw completely through a three way wire, but I poked a nail through my finger. Thanks to the Gods of Idiot DIY-ers, the breaker was off, so I wasn’t inadvertently subjected to self-induced defibrillation. 

The other signs of progress are having our painting guru start prepping woodwork and walls where tiles where scraped off, and getting a tinbasher on site to fix up some of the more creative duct layouts in the house and add supply/return air to a room that previously had none! Apparently, heat and ventilation was highly overrated by previous owners. (Digression alert: ever seen the movie ‘Brazil’? “Harry Tuttle Heating Engineer at your service!”)


So now we have one section of floor nicely level, a mess of a subfloor by the back door and most of our remaining finishes ordered.