I knew things were going well when Rob walked into the cabin and remarked that the cabin smelled the way our dome-house used to ! There's nothing like the sweet aroma of roasted chiles, and it's been far too long since we've enjoyed some.
And kudos to Rob too - for the spiffy blender. When the base of my old one started pouring out smoke in the early Fall, I did some research and chose a new model I liked but thought was too expensive. Rob kept an eye out for a sale, and then not only found one on sale for half price, but scooped a huge rebate from the manufacturer. Although it works beautifully, Jet doesn't seem to like it, and barks every time I start it up. He'll get used to the sound eventually I'm sure.
I always imagine that winter will bring lots of free time to sit home and read, curled up next to the warm wood stove. But in actual fact most winter days we seem busier than ever, and reading times are far and few between. With the extreme cold we were kept busy filling the wood stove both here in the the cabin, and over at the new house, pulling firewood out of our wood pile and stacking it on the nearby porches, and watching in dismay as our wood pile quickly dwindled. Luckily we both really enjoy winter, so it's no real hardship to spend extra time bundling up in multiple layers before we leave the cabin, getting all our outer wear hung to dry afterwards, being outside clearing ice and snow from the truck, around the cabin and the house, and plowing the lane ways. We almost always get Jet out for three good walks no matter what the weather, and added in with the regular house keeping tasks, cat care, meal preparation and some attempt to get some work done on the new house, well - the days sure fly by. Everything seems to take a little longer in the winter, and the daylight hours are just so much shorter too! But while I may not sit and read, the beauty around us always lures me out, and I make time for a good long walk whenever I can. I almost always spend a good deal of time down by the river. The cold temperatures in January brought swift and dramatic changes to the water, both in the way it looked, and the way it sounded.
Eventually even that small amount of open water disappeared from view. But standing at the river's edge I could always hear the flow - it's a magical sound almost like a steel drum as it pounds against the ice above it, tumbles over the rocks below, and laps unseen at the river's edge.
One morning I visited the river and it was a simple white vista; a few short hours later the water levels had risen, flowing over the white snow cover, and turned the river into what looked like a magical skating rink. It wasn't safe of course to try it out, as we knew it wasn't actually truly frozen over! But it was absolutely beautiful to look at.
Mid-January the extremely cold temperatures eased somewhat. Rob and I were assessing the propane usage in the workshop, and decided that although our idea of installing two 100 lb. tanks and driving them into the nearest town for fill-ups, had seemed like a good idea, it was in fact a rather difficult task. They are awkward enough when empty, and even more so when full, and we were refilling them far too often. We called around for pricing and checked with a neighbour for a recommendation, and decided to sign up with a company that would deliver two larger sized tanks, and then fill them for us on a regular basis. If the cost becomes too exorbitant we may have to look at another solution, but for now this is working beautifully. We had an inspection of our system, they brought two new tanks and installed them, and one crazy stormy night a truck pulled up and the driver hopped out cheerily and filled our tanks!
The second half of January was a bit of a blur. Rob was complaining of a slightly sore shoulder, when Jet decided one day to lunge up at a passing Raven, and the next thing we knew all symptoms were pointing towards a torn rotator cuff. We can't sing the praises enough for our health care system here, that saw Rob processed quickly through Emergency, X-rays, an MRI and a visit with a sports medicine specialist within a few short days! Fortunately, he "only" has arthritis, and the extreme pain he had was in fact due to deep inflammation, so with the help of some anti inflammatory meds, rest and exercises, he was soon back on his feet, and using that arm. While recuperating though, he stayed home, watching dozens of "how-to" videos on everything from dust collection systems to tiling jobs, resting that shoulder, and promising not to get back at working on the house until he was able.
When he was able, he eased in gently and spent time getting his workshop set up. With all the interior work on the house that remains to be done, he needed some proper working space, and access to his tools to start building what we will need. I think it will be quite a while before the workshop is truly set up in the way that works best, but for now, it's more usable, and things are starting to find their place.
Early February we had a small celebration of our first date FORTY years ago - Yikes! I am sure that somewhere there are some earlier photos of the two of us together, but I haven't come across them yet. We only recently pulled out our box of photos and photo albums from storage and haven't gone through them all. These are about the earliest I could find, and even then I think it may be a year or two into our life together. I just took a quick photo of them for now, but should scan them properly sometime. The first two snaps were taken with an old instant camera, and have held up fairly well considering! And I can't help but comment that in the first photo, behind Rob I can see the old cantilever stairs he built, and he was mudding the drywall in the dome. Hmmmm...some things never change!
And here we are with our friend Gary (on the right), who later was best man at our wedding!
With celebrations (and plenty of reminiscing!) out of the way, we got back to working on the new house.
The first task seemed easy enough (I thought) as we began preparing the guest bathroom shower area. Rob worked on defining the shower area, installing some concrete board, smoothing and leveling the shower floor base, and installing the linear drain.
"The devil is in the details" they say, and that's proving to be true when building this space. We've spent time looking at photos of hundreds of "shower niches" used to hold soap and shampoos etc., and had lots of discussions about the size, design and placement of the niche, not to mention location of towel racks, and shower heads. The linear drain had it's own issues, and the levels of the original concrete floor did as well. I don't know why I thought I would come home from work to see all the tiles up, as even now, we haven't even started! We are using 3 different styles of tiles, and have detailed drawings of all the possible combinations of the three, but are now happy (we hope) with the design we've chosen. I guess we'll know when we start tiling.
As usual in the winter, just as Rob got back to working on the house, a snow storm arrived, and he was pulled away to plow the lane way and road in. However, as he has been warned not to use his arm for repetitive tasks, changing jobs often probably isn't a bad thing right now. I'm just glad we didn't get any snow while his arm was healing, as I can't drive the tractor/snowblower! (But clearly I shall have to learn....)
Once the snow was taken care of, work continued on the guest bathroom, and it was an exciting day (for me anyway) the day the shower head got installed. Who could resist jumping into the shower space and pretending to be under the shower? Well, not me; jump in I did.
By mid February, the house began to take on a different look. Rob was interspersing work on the bathroom with "mudding" the drywall throughout some areas of the house. As well, areas that had been left to "deal with later" now needed dealing with, and all the finishing bits of drywall had to be installed once and for all. While a coat of drywall compound was drying on one wall, Rob would continue along in another place in the house. It's a seemingly endless task at first. But slowly, the look and design of specific areas began to come together. And those lovely timbers began to emerge again, as the areas around them became a little bit more finished. I can't even imagine what it will look like when we begin to paint!
This was taken from the front hallway looking toward the guest bedroom/guest bathroom area. There's a nice little "niche" area in the left hand side of the hallway that will someday hold some of our favourite art pieces.
Looking at the guest room on the left, guest bathroom on the right. Some tricky angles there, but after all those years of dry walling the triangles in our dome, Rob should be used to it!
The view from inside the shower! I love the timbers... And the shower will have a tempered glass wall so I won't lose that view of them when I'm in the shower.
The drywall taping and "mudding" getting done in the other areas of the house. (And yes, that is still a temporary staircase; the permanent one will have proper railings!)
Baseboards installed in the living room, with speaker wires all tucked in behind as well. Baseboards are REALLY BIG for me - as we never did get around to installing them in the dome, until we were preparing to sell it. Honestly, I can't believe we have some installed already!
Note - Rob designed a different kind of baseboard for the living room/dining room area only, that will tie in with the look of the windows frames that are being built and installed. They were a pain to do though, and the rest of the house won't have these. But the other rooms will still have baseboards - right Rob?
A different view of the front hall:
Unfortunately, for now, work on our bedroom and bathroom has come to a halt, as we had to stuff everything into that space in order to work on the rest of the house. The floors there have not been acid stained either, so there's a lot of work to be done there!
Between "mudding" drywall, and climbing up and down off scaffolding, and putting in rather long days doing both, Rob needed a break. So he took some time to go back to a job he had started before Christmas; window frames! And installed the frames in the dining room.
And began to work on the frames in the living room too.
Having scaffolding in the living room feels entirely normal to me. There was a period of time when it was our staircase at the dome, when we were dry walling and painting the interior. A rather long period of time as I recall...
And this one is for me. A closet. I dream of these! My clothes are currently stuffed into drawers, and cabinets or in storage. While it works, I really think a closet is going to be so much better.
We've picked paint colours and have a gallon of each of our choices mixed and ready to use. It was somewhat disconcerting when the paint store owner said "Pink and peach colours eh? No one picks those anymore. But they are really nice warm colours." Rob and I just smiled and then got in the truck and looked at each other somewhat horrified. Did we really pick pink and peach? Well, time will tell, but we don't think we did, and we've been staring at these colour chips for a really long time. There's no question the "pink" paint has a bit of a red tone as we read it's a good choice for a north facing room, but neither of us see peach in the other room choices. Fingers crossed we got it right!
Mid February our weather changed, and became positively spring like. Our firewood consumption dropped significantly, and we began to dream of open windows, and fresh air. Unfortunately it also brought rain, freezing rain and ice pellets, and turned our entire road in to the cabin into a massive skating rink.
Each rain storm just built up that ice a bit more and we found ourselves hoping for wet snow that would stick to the ice and give us some traction. For 3 weeks or more we wouldn't leave the house without our boot cleats on, and Jet had no "play times" as it was too icy. Even walking him was a chore. I stuffed the truck into a snow bank twice after getting stuck on one of the small hills in, and one morning just could not get up the main hill. I had to reverse several times back down the hill (mostly sliding down backwards) after only making it partway up, until I gave up and went back to get Rob to give it a try. I soon learned to bring my boot cleats along with me in the truck so I could walk home!
Ahhh, boot cleats. Wish I had known about those years ago. With my cleats on I was able to still go for a walk with my camera on my days off. Although I am always out with my camera every chance I can get, I realized I was missing the PhotoCoach challenges from 2017, so was really happy when "Charles the Light Coach" announced he would post the weekly challenges again in 2018. I still can't believe that anyone could be so generous with their time and expertise, but gladly have jumped in again with my weekly submissions.
I don't often do "selfies" but as the main photographer on the blog, it isn't often that there is a photo of me!. Here I am, sitting at one of my favourite spots near the river. It's often the place that I find some inspiration for the weekly challenge. It's a lovely place to sit.
With the milder weather in February, the river began to open up quickly, and it was amazing to watch the ice break up.
It opened up more each day.
Until it was flowing quickly by once again. There is still lots of ice along the banks though, and every now and then a large piece will break off and float by!
When I'm not by the river I walk through the woods and up past the farmer's fields.
Where we recently spotted an owl, and had the opportunity to watch a red fox making it's way through the field. The owl was pretty shy and flew away long before we got close. We don't often see a fox out in the open and it was a pleasure to be able to observe it for a while. It would turn and look back at us every now and then, with no apparent concern.
The arrival of March brought back quite a bit of winter weather for us. But the daylight hours are at least longer now. Rob can work longer days over at the new house, as he doesn't have to quit working quite so early just so that he can get Jet out for his last walk of the day before dark. Jet seems to know that he now goes out later than he used to, but still, at the end of the day, I always find him at the window, waiting for Rob's arrival.
The next couple of months will see a lot of finishing work done at the new house, and I'm sure that by the time I post the next blog, there will be a multitude of changes to be seen in the house. Even as I write this, Rob is busy putting in more interior window frames, and he is getting closer to where he can begin sanding the drywall seams. Our evening conversations, which used to consist of construction how-to questions, have now switched into "where things will go" discussions, which has to be a good thing doesn't it?
Spring has arrived, at least according to the calendar, and we will soon be seeing signs of it here as well. We've seen robins and geese arriving, and today Rob heard Sandhill Cranes flying over the river. I'm sure Spring can't be too far away. I may miss our evenings curled up by a warm wood stove, but I'm anxious to open our windows, hear some bird song, and sweep the winter's dust out through an open door.
