Save the birds!

The landscaping for the ponds is proceeding well.

Here Cameron (L shovel) and Steve (R shovel) are competing with each other in the Shovel Olympics. :))) Actually they are just smoothing out the dam around this pond.
Unfortunately, we have found a few dead birds around the house. This one was on the deck outside the great room. What a shame!

Note the red flashes under the wings - if you know what kind of bird this is, please email or leave a note in the comments. I think it eats seeds because of the shape of the beak.

According to flap.org, birds fly into windows and kill themselves because they can't see the window and think they have a clear path ahead. The best prevention is to have drapes. We weren't going to get drapes in the dining room, but have decided that we are going to get some kind of sheers to reduce the hazard to birds....

But what to do about the feature window in the great room??? In order to attempt to protect the birds from flying into the glass there, we taped up some silhouettes of flying birds. This is supposed to be mostly ineffective, according to the Toronto Humane Society web page.

flap.org (Fatal Light Awareness Program) talks about a film that can you apply to the exterior of the window. This costs US$3/s.f. so is a bit costly.

If you have any cheaper ideas but still esthetically nice, let us know.

Waiting and Delays.. (Day 461)

That's the order of the days... and weeks, it seems.

Still waiting for some sub-trades to come back and correct their deficiencies. Still waiting for the builder's crew to come back and remedy the deficiencies they are responsibile for. The builder is waiting for the replacement doors to come in (won't be in until August) and the stone for the fireplace finishing (also anticipated in August).

The flooring guy is coming tomorrow to correct the levitating floor. It's a floating floor and was installed too tight. And I just discovered last week, it was installed with a slight skew to it, so it is not square to the house. Fortunately it isn't really obvious. I told the flooring guy that he can take off whatever trim he needs to, but it has to look exactly like it looks now -- which is pretty darn near perfect!

The landscaper who is installing the "armour wall" and stairs to the front and laundry room doors was supposed to start the "first or second week of July". Now it is the middle of next week which is the third week of July.

Needless to say we are exhausted from having trades people pop up at random moments with no obvious plan to get things completed.

Remedying the deficiencies

On June 22nd, I did a walkaround with Charles to create the list of deficiencies that need to be remedied. This list of deficiencies is part of the Ontario New Home Warranty Program - which is administered by a company called Tarion. (You have probably already noticed that Tarion is an anagram of Ontario - very clever. hah!)

One of the things that had been irking us for quite some time was that there was no indicator on the HRV controls if the HRV was On or Off. In other words, I could go into one bathroom, and push the HRV "On" button to activate the HRV before having a shower. If you went into the other bathroom and did the same thing, you would have no idea if the HRV was on or not, and pushing the "On" button might actually turn the unit off! This problem was caused by the HVAC installer running 2-conductor wire to the controls, instead of the 3-conductor that it needs to support the indicator light as well as the switch.

Back in May, I had a meeting with Luc, one of the owners of the HVAC company, and he tried to tell me that the HRV and controls were working how they were supposed to. I quickly proved to him that it did not. Last week he was trying to get "turn" timers, that would work with 2-conductor wires. I told Charles that mechanical timers were not acceptable as it is no longer 1970, and Charles passed that along.

This was finally remedied on Wednesday, July 5th, 2006 (Day 455).

On June 20th, a guy from the HVAC company came and fixed the leaks in the plumbing of the heating system. (Look at the May 29th blog entry for the description of the issues.) Luc had blamed "something in the water" for the rust, and I said that I thought it was bi-metallic corrosion. Guess what? The original installer had not put sufficient teflon tape on the treads of the pipe joining the copper pipe to the iron fitting. This means it was bi-metallic corrosion.

Rainy weather & the deck

I was off work last week so you know what that means -- rain every day, you say? Well, you are right!

This is what the sky looked like one evening after the pre-requisite rainshower. Quite beautiful!
My sister Rachel came to visit last week. When going for a walk the first evening, we discovered all this gorgeous slate beside the excavation of a house that is being built two lots over. We spent much of that first evening collecting some spectacular specimens for use as a walkway.

I estimate there is at least 3,500 lbs of rock in this little pile.
One of the major things that Rachel helped with was the construction of the deck. In this collage you can see (top->bottom, L->R): (a) deck blocks set out and leveled, (b) start of framing, (c) first joists installed, and (d) second row of joists mostly installed.

Another collage:
- Freda & Rachel installing the blocking
- the deck frame with the blocking installed
- rain on the partially decked deck
- more rain after about 1/4 of the decking was installed.

Rachel worked very hard helping me with the deck frame. Framing the deck is the hardest part and while you can do it by yourself, it takes more than twice as long to do it yourself. A second pair of hands makes the progress much much faster. Rachel was the second pair of hands in the deck framing and I couldn't have made this amount of progress with her hard work. Thank you so much, Rachel!
More rain. See the backyard has been levelled.
More rain after about 1/2 of the deck was completed.

Day 438 - believe it or not, Mr. Ripley!!!

I haven't posted the Day XXX of the build for a long time because it's been extremely depressing to see the days tick by and so little get accomplished. Nobody seems inclined to finish up the last little bits, but we have decided that nobody is getting any more money until it all gets finished. Of course, we are waiting for the holdback to be released from the lawyer, so we don't have much choice in the matter anyway.

Today is Day 438 our house build!! Yes, it is incredible. What is even more incredible is that it's still not done!

Still to do:
- remediation of HRV controls by HVAC people. They installed 2-conductor wire to the controls instead of the required 3-wire, and now they have to fix the problem. As I said to the guy today, "It's your company's problem, not my problem."
- remediation of the heaving floors. They were installed too tight, and the humidity has caused them to heave. Reducing the humidity should help, but the humidity is within the acceptable range.
- parging - the material used to parge seems to wash away. Not nice at all.
- caulking around windows and doors - not complete and some has to be redone in spots.
- repair of a few broken shingles and loose soffits.
- putting backer rod and mortar in the air space behind the stone, where it adjoins the soffits
- covering up the styrofoam on the brick ledge - the stone mason should probably have put some mortar on this first to fix the problem

From a deferring costs perspective, I wanted to defer getting an air conditioner, but we had to because the house gets so warm with all the large windows -- that was installed today. I also wanted to defer getting eavestroughs, but we are going to have to get them to control the runoff water.

The biggest things still to be done are:
- post light - (not really big, but not done) waiting for light fixture - we ordered it a month ago
- fireplace - waiting for stone
- front steps - waiting....
- rough landscaping - waiting...

This past weekend I installed the rest of the exterior light fixtures and plugs, painted the exterior doors (I took off and reinstalled all the door hardware in order to do a good job), fixed the laundry room vac pan, fixed a 3-way switch screw-up, and corrected all the flipped and mixed up switches. I was busy with things from 8am until 10:30pm on Sunday. Freda was doing other things outside with the gardening etc. Whew!

Changing the electrical code...

This was the situation at the back of the house. The electrician installed a pair of wires for the generator plug in (on the back wall) and for the air conditioner (on the side wall not far from the propane regulator). The air conditioner salesman said this wasn't right, and any source of ignition (i.e. an electrical spark from the a/c compressor starting up, or plugging something in) had to be a minimum of 10' from a potential propane leak.

The electrician said he did everything according to the electrical code. This didn't make sense to me. How could the codes be in conflict? So I emailed the above photo along with the explanation to the Electrical Safety Authority. This was the response:

"You are correct, the Propane Storage and Handling Code - CSA B149.2-05 and the Ontario Electrical Safety Code (OESC) do not match regarding the minimum clearance required between electrical sources of ignition and the propane tanks / regulator.

OESC Rule 2-322 (Electrical Equipment near Combustible Gas Meters and Other Devices) states "When installed outdoors, arc producing electrical equipment shall not be installed within 1 m of the discharge of a combustible gas relief device or vent."

The Propane Storage and Handling Code requires minimum 3 m clearance between the tanks and any source of ignition.

As in any installation, if there are two codes that can be applied, then the most stringent shall take precedence.

ESA is now researching the discrepancy between the codes and taking action to correct. "

Isn't it strange that I had to do this???

Note that the electrician was not even compliant to the electrical code - the wire for the air condition was only 18" from the propane regulator, not the required minimum of 1m. The generator plug was about 24" away. He asked me where I wanted the wires, and I said to put them where they are in this photo. However, I don't know the codes and if what I wanted wasn't compliant to the codes he should have told me he couldn't do it!

More pictures 2

Freda yanked this sign out of the ground.

Here you can see the two colours of caulking - sandalwood anywhere adjacent to stucco, and grey next to the concrete.
Shingling the last part of the roof.

More pictures

Redoing the parging. See the part on the right that has not been done yet.
Caulking the windows and doors. They ran out of the caulking because there were some large gaps between the stucco band and the window frames. Hopefully the annoying ants will no longer get in. I sprinkled two boxes of Borax around the house where the ants seemed to be coming from.

10.9 metric tonnes of Granular A. It may not look like it, but that's 10 wheelbarrow loads of GA in front of the garage doors.
10 wheelbarrow loads = 250 shovels = 2000 pounds.





The remains of Mount Berry.

There still is about 3-4 feet of extra fill at the back, where Mount Berry used to be. We will have to spread that out.





Every room has a view, even the powder room!









Steve Berry, taking away most of the last of Mount Berry.

Note the smoke where the shovel is grinding on the rock.

Subsoil and receding rock lines...

This is our front lawn. The soil isn't too good, as you can see there is very little organic matter here.

This rock shouldn't have all been leveled out - about a foot needs to be taken away and then filled with dirt so we can actually plant grass.

Here, you can see the high rock level line as the rock receded. (haha - play on words of high water line, etc)

There's still a pile left, but it is far smaller than it was.

The large pile of trees that were pulled down to make room for our house was set afire on Friday. Even though it drizzled all Saturday, it is still smouldering.

This is the front of the house with the pots and the first coat of paint on the front door. It is a deep red, and is a Ben Moore colour called Raisin Torte.

And no, I don't believe Raisin Torte it has anything to do with lawyers.

May 31st thunderstorm and the disappearing Mount Berry

We had another terrific rain storm.

You would have been soaked to the skin in seconds in this downpour. This was three thunderstorms in three days...




The rain was pouring off the roof so fast that it created a vortex at the valleys.

You might need to blow this one up to see it.


This is a collage of Mount Berry, timeline is L->R, from top row. You can see how Mount Berry was higher than the bar for the transom window at first, and then you could see a bit of trees, and then the horizon, and now a lot of the horizon.