Day 480 - landscaping progress

This is the dining room, with a view of the lake.

I don't think I've posted a photo like this before. This is a million dollar view.

I also realized that I had never even taken a photo of the solarium without the mound of rock that was Mount Berry, or something like that. So this photo shows the general layout of the solarium. What a pretty room!

Jason, hard at work in his little Bobcat, taking a rock to the front flower bed, for some texture.

Freda is very happy with the new pathway!

Wow! That looks fabulous!

The guys doing the fireplace are Portuguese, and they are still upset about how Portugal was robbed at the World Cup!

Here, one guy is buttering the back of the brick and installing it. The other guy is cutting them as fast as guy #1 can mark them.

UPDATE: the guy in the photo here is Joe, and his son is "the other guy".
This is the armour wall. You saw it on page 14 or 15, I think. The black stuff is some excess landscape fabric.

Update: Huh - what does that mean: "You saw it on page 14 or 15, I think"??? I obviously wrote that when I was tired. :^))

You can see what the armour wall looks like from the porch on the July 25th blog entry.

This is the finished fireplace.

All we can say is "Wow!"

Joe and his son are coming back tomorrow to redo / repair the parging.

Finally! The fireplace finishing starts!

The stone, that we have been waiting months for, for the fireplace finishing arrived a couple of weeks ago. We were starting to get worried that we hadn't seen any action. This was partly due to the fact that Charles head guy, Dave, had caught a serious virus and was laid up for over a week. Charles found some other guys to install the stone. It looks pretty good so far!

The only concern - and there always is one, isn't there! - is that Charles (or David) had told me that they were going to put a thin piece of plywood on the floor to provide a gap (so the floor could easily move) and support the stone at the same time. When the mortar dried, they would remove the plywood. There is no plywood or other spacer here between the floor and the stone which makes me wonder if this might cause future problems with the floor buckling. I hope not! We've had several lifetimes of headaches and hassles over that already!

Ooops!

This morning Cammy was working the shovel, and backed a little too far over the edge, with the result that the shovel fell backwards down the little cliff and the shovel unit detached from the tracks. Since the shovel unit basically is held onto the tracks by gravity, there is not a big deal to put it back together. Except for the fact that it is heavy, of course!

Landscaping is in progress!

We have not had been able to use our front door or our laundry room door because we have not had any steps to them. The landscaping has now started, and a key part of that is the "armour wall", which is a wall made up of big chunky stones, as you can see here. We are fortunate as we had lots of these on site.

In fact, several friends and come out (some making several trips) to pick up stones for their landscaping. One couple hired a guy with a dual-axle truck to take two loads of stones (the size of these ones) to their property.
Here is the finished armour wall, looking down on it from the porch in front of the front door. We had just had a good rain, so I didn't feel like getting my feet all muddy to take a good photo of the wall. I will do that in a few days.

Freda is going to have a rose bed between the two steps. The pathway is going to be a bit more curvy than you can see here. We also hope to have river rock on top of the dirt, to help keep the pestilential diseases off the roses.

Done with the floor

Finally the floor is done.

Umpteen kazillion phone calls later.

Three point eight seven million broken dates later...

Seven hundred and fifty six thousand dings on the wall later...

Oh, but always a big mess to clean up.

But it is done now. The floor is flat once again and hopefully will remain so forever.

Satellite update

Google has updated their satellite images of the Jiulia Lake area. The satellite image is now in high resolution mode, and this one shows our house in construction phase sometime last year.

However, it do find it quite odd that the little photo (bottom right) that shows where you are relative to a larger area is from the old satellite images.

Bird identified: Juvenile Male Rose-Breasted Grosbeak

On July 12th (Save the Birds) I posted about an unfortunate bird that smacked into our window and killed itself. I had never seen this kind of bird before and asked what it was.

Some friends of Freda's suggested it was a female Rose-Breasted Grosbeak. Armed with that information, I googled for that bird but none of the descriptions for the female RBG said anything about red under the wing, so I didn't think that was it.

My mum talked to a Naturalist at the John Janson Centre in Edmonton, who identified it as a juvenile male Rose-Breasted Grosbeak. I googled some more and found some really good pictures at this archival page A Glut of Grosbeaks from Hilton Pond Center, SC (US). The juvenile male RBG has similar head and breast colouration as the adult female, except it has red under the wings whereas the adult female has yellow.

Colour me surprised!

Well, Mike was supposed to come this morning at 8:30am to fix the floors. He just called at 7:30am and said that he can't come today, and cna he come on Saturday.

I think this guy has only ever showed up on time once. At least he had the courtesy to call this time instead of just not showing up.

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.