Month: August 2008

This weekend we had my dad out helping us put drywall on the ceiling. It goes quick with lots of helpers. We did over half the ceiling in a few hours. It’s looking really great.

I’m adding a quick update before I go to bed, We got the first 3 sheets of drywall attached to the ceiling today, 37 more to go.

The scaffold has been fitted with dual drywall holder tees and 2 winches, one for the tees and one to lift the drywall from the floor. It makes it really easy to do and it was inexpensive.

We bought a new fridge, It’s super old and classic, I really enjoy it.

I got Andrew to give me a quick lesson on wiring electrical panels (I could have figured it out but he gave me some great pointers). The deal is do the grounds first, then the neutrals, it keeps them in the back and makes things neat. I did both panels, they look good. Andrew stopped by to run the 1/0 to the back panel through the conduit in the floor. Then Andrew helped me lift the first drywall panel from the winch to the lift tees.

 

It’s been a while since I’ve posted any progress. So far this month I’ve just about finished the insulating (many thanks to Jen and Sheryl who did pretty much all the crappy hard to fit pieces, and Jen did the north wall behind the wiring).

I also built a scaffold. I priced some scaffolding and it would cost me over $1000 to get what I need, to build the same thing in wood it was a shade under $200 and it took less than a day to build. An other bonus with the wood scaffold is that I will reuse the wood for the bulkhead above the kitchen, shelving, and walls so there will be little waste.  It the background you can see the heat pump that I bought for $700. It works like an air conditioner but it can be used in reverse to heat the house as well (well at least until -15C. then the in-floor heat takes over).

I was going to run another extension cord to a power bar to do some cutting while the lights were on today, then it occurred to me, I’m wasting time running cords everywhere and I have a generator panel that I could be using. So I ran the generator wire into the panel and wired in a few circuits for lights, plugs, and the water pump. Now I just start the generator and everything works. I also noticed that the metering crew was over and installed a electrical meter in the meter panel. I think we will have electricity soon, we just need the pole crew to come.

We were in Saskatchewan and Sheryl and Lilla’s home and Wanda dug some raspberry bushes for our garden, we packed the car absolutely full and took them back. When we got back we planted them on the road side of the garden (it was late and too dark to take a picture)

I found some old pictures of Wanda’s garden. When I build the house she tends to the garden, it’s rather large and it should supply us with enough canned and preserved vegetables to last us through the winter. I don’t have any current pictures but just imagine the corn being 4 feet tall and the rest taller as well and that’s how it looks today