Day 255 - The week in review

Drive up - Sunday December 18th, 2005

As noted in Saturday's blog entry, we received 25cm between Thursday and Friday evening. This meant we had a lot of snow in the driveway. Since we need to have easy access for the various trades on Monday, Charles brought his snowblower over in the morning before church and we cleared out the driveway in fairly short order.

This photo also shows some of my handiwork from yesterday. Due to the wind conditions, a fair bit of snow blew in the two south facing doors. The crew stapled some poly up over the doors but the wind blew it off, so I fastened some strips of wood over the poly to hold it down. Even with the strapping on the edges of the garage doors, the plastic was flapping a lot. I fastened some strapping across the middle of the door to take some of the pressure off the plastic.

I haven't had a photo of Tawny for a while now, so here she is doing what we call her "soldier sit". She does this very upright sit posture when she is showing how good she is so she can get a treat -- very cute. You can see that Tawny has what is called "snow nose". A dog's nose should be black (or else it is considered a flaw by judges in dog shows), but dog's who sniff a lot - like Labs - stick their nose in the snow and the cold causes frostbite at the cellular level, causing the pink tones.

In the heading I promised "the week in review". So here is a review of the blog entry from Monday, Dec 12th:

Day 249 - Things for this week
Taking cover off to straighten chimney
Chimney guy didn't call back, so I faxed him a photo of the crooked chimney with a note that it was unacceptable. He called back 2 days later and left a message to call - I called back on Thursday morning and just got his voice mail. No response yet.

Heating guy there to finish hvac.
I actually think this was done.

Started on poly and strapping
Poly completed on Saturday, thanks to Dave. Started tacking strapping into place.

Charles will call for an inspection of the vapour barrier.

Drilled hole for electric supply for island - twice.
Well, that was last week actually.

Drywall guy was there to measure for quote
We received a quote last week from one company, and received another from the guy we would prefer to use on Wednesday. Unfortunately, the quote from the preferred guy was 23% higher than the first company. I negotiated a reduction in his price to match the first company.

Get heat on boiler for air-side by end of week
Didn't happen. The heating plumber had trouble getting things going - the water wasn't flowing through the coil in the air exchanger for some reason. As it was about 5pm, he said he would come back on Friday and get it going. Unfortunately, the weather made driving difficult in the morning and he never came out at all. So we still don't have heat.

We did have a propane tank heater in the basement but it ran out sometime on Friday night. The temperature in the basement on Saturday was 46F which was no problem for frost on the water pipes. I brought in the propane tank from our barbecue today and hooked it up to the heater but didn't fire it up as it was still 47F in basement.