Life Without Shirley Ann

Yesterday we were pretty socked in here most of the day... but I did a little walk around and took a few current photos to share.

You can hardly see the huge "Tree House" tree in the centre of the photo... however the clouds lifted in the afternoon and I went for a long walk.

I spent most of Friday framing the dormer windows with wide cedar boards... which meant building a simple scaffold so I could work with ease that high up.  Can't finish the siding without having these windows framed first.

This morning at 6 AM I was up and out putting another coat of white paint on the new frames I installed on Friday.  As I was doing this I was thinking how much these window frames are like picture frames... with the most wonderful view in all the Gulf Islands!

By noon I expect to have theT & G cedar V-groove installed in the soffit over these windows.

The tiger lilies were a blaze of glory.

My favorite lily is this pure yellow one.

The California poppies.

If Shirley were here, I am sure she would have been picking some of these wonderful roses and put them on the table in a vase.

When she left this was a great bouquet on the dining room table... but this picture shows my life without Shirley Ann.

"A picture is worth a thousand words."

Construction Update April 8-13

Last Sunday I finished installing the cedar ceiling over the stairs going up to our new studio.  The walls in this stairwell will also be finished in channel cedar, just like the original house... and so I had to purchase some more 8" channel cedar this past week.

On Wednesday we brought home more channel cedar, more 3" V-groove cedar for soffits...

and enough R-28 batts of pink insulation for the portico ceiling.  Since I could not get 12" wide batts, I will have to cut 24" wide batts in half.  Lots of extra work... but what else can I do?

I got started installing the insulation and have one bundle in place already... 14 more to go!

I started putting some soffit and siding on this back wall of the studio... but in order to even work in this area I had to find a creative way to set up a scaffold.  From the scaffold I could then bridge some planks across onto the sloped roof.  It as a little like setting up a scaffold on a double titter totter.  The old tree stump was one fulcrum and the rock wall was another.  The vertical 2x4 helped to minimize the teetering.  It ended up being very stable and safe.

The key to keeping the scaffold from even starting to tip over was interlocking a board behind the concrete post as you can see in the middle top of this picture.

This is not a roof where one can nail anything onto like a cedar shake roof.  So everything I have on the roof is tied into the planks on the scaffolding.

I then built a flat ladder with cleats on a 2x12 that allowed me to work in reasonable comfort on this tricky part of the building.  Shirley pre-painted all the channel cedar in our new colour... Traditional Cape Cod Grey. These boards are all recycled from off the face of our house.  I pre-cut all the boards to fit and got this section completed on Friday afternoon after the plumber left.

We failed to take any photos of Kevin Dean, the plumber... and me roughing in the waste lines for the bathroom shower, toilet and sink on Friday. It was a bit of an ugly job going under the house and working a very cramped, dirty crawl space, but we got the waste line tied into the same line that services our master bathroom.  We only have the water supply lines to do and to complete the plumbing rough in.

Some things are funnier than others...
be sure to watch to the end... they saved the very best to the last!
Don't miss the ending.



Have a great week.