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.
