Exit, Pursued by a Bear

Closing

The Melita house gets sold some time Thursday, when the buyer’s payment is processed.
It was a nice, snug unproblematical house, and I’ll miss it, though for somebody whose hobbies are basically home improvement and gardening, it was bound to run out of potential sooner or later. No fear of that in the new place, at least not in this decade.
The picture is of the front garden in October, 2002.

Moveable feast

So we’re officially east-enders who own a house in the west end (till Thursday) instead of the other way around. Moving turned into an extended ordeal for a couple of reasons, including the movers’ decision to show up with a five-ton truck, instead of one maybe twice as big. We filled it, drove out to the east end, unloaded, drove to C’s storage unit at the foot of Ossington, went back to the west end, filled it again, went back to the east end again, and unloaded. There are actually a lot of leftovers still at the old house, including a lot of books, but we couldn’t face a third trip. I’ll see what I can squeeze into the car tonight – two trips might do it.

(The movers were on their 18th straight work day – today they’re on their 19th – and were as glassy-eyed and short-tempered as one would expect. Also, the least-alpha-personality on the three-man crew, who also had the least command of English, was foreman, which made for odd dynamics. Being a mover, honestly, strikes me as one of the worst jobs. I’d rather be a roofer, given the choice, and that’s saying quite a lot.)

Anyway, it ended well, and we’re more or less installed.

New house, new commute

I'm having fun figuring out how to ride to work from the new house. The southbound route (Map) seems to be the Don trail south from the footbridge and from there to the Queen's Quay bike lane. (The footbridge stairs down into the valley are signed as being closed until Aug. 1, but they don't look open to me.)

The daylight route home (Map) has potential as a pretty brisk 25-minute workout - Queen's Quay to the Lakeshore bike lane and north on Logan. Riding the Lakeshore bike lane yesterday, I realized how conditioned I am to stopping for signs, lights, traffic and so forth - I'm really not used to 800 metres of clear asphalt to just build up momentum on. Also, the Withrow Park part of Logan is a fairly serious hill to finish things off.

‘So, long, you corpulent shrimp!’

Via BoingBoing: Somebody has scanned and uploaded 80 episodes, if that’s the right word, of the pre-First World War comic strip The Outbursts of Everett True. True is sort of Ko-Ko from the Mikado (‘I've got a little list/Of society offenders who might well be underground/And who never would be missed!’) played by Don Cherry:

The setup of the strip is extremely simple, in that wonderful turn-of-the-(last)-century way. In the first panel, Everett is subjected to one of the many common annoyances, indignations, and outrages that are foisted upon each of us daily.
In the second, he beats someone up.
And the rest just writes itself, folks! That's a mark of genius, as far as I'm concerned: find a great concept and work it ad infinitum, into myriad variations on a theme. The fun is in the extraordinary variety of both offenses and ways to punish them.

We need a 21st-century Everett, if only for the pleasure of watching him throw spammers into horse-troughs or claw-footed bathtubs, but the pests of our own age work from behind defences.

rest here

House update (Thursday)

The floor refinishers finish today, and the floors look awesome. We'll have to repaint now.

House update

The floor refinishers have finished their second day, having found all the nails we missed in a relentless effort last week to pull them all out.

We're using the time to work on packing the Melita house, an enormous job which - continues. Also, Bell says we can't keep our phone number because we're moving to a different part of the city, though I can't imagine why it would matter in this day and age.

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In other news: another GoogleMaps oops here.

House, redux

A good day with the house. The Ikea kitchen cabinets have arrived and are flat-packed in the basement, the electrician is paid and his work tested, a drywaller is willing to tape and finish drywalling we do, which is fine, I sold copper piping for $20 to some passing scrap dealers, and the dumpster (#3) is mostly full, filled with:

3fl wreckage from ripping that kitchen out (at least in theory, there were at one time five kitchens in the house), and last of the 3fl linoleum

rolled-up carpet from the basement

the huge pile of wreckage on the front porch, including the gas stove. Anybody want two stoves and three refrigerators? Heavy pickup will only do three at a time.

all kitchen wreckage on the back patio minus the concrete: mostly tile and ply.

Also lots of sweeping. After all that, I went to work. :)

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In other news, Colby Cosh’s very sane post on Michaëlle Jean is here.

So -

After going to work on the kitchen floor with sledge, pick and crowbar, and removing

kitchen cabinets
and
a layer of pink-and-white ceramic tiles
and
a layer of cement and reinforcing wire mesh
and
a layer of linoleum under that
and
a layer of quarter-inch ply under that (firmly nailed down)
and
another layer of quarter-inch ply under that
and
an ancient layer of linoleum

there turns out to be a more or less perfectly preserved hardwood floor in the kitchen.

Must go to woods -

We played hooky from the renovations and headed to Massasauga with the canoe. Click on link for pix -

Week One

... more or less wound up.

- The roofers have come and gone, having filled most of two dumpsters with the old roof - previous owners had been adding new layers since 1912, and it was four or five inches thick.
- Lots of wallpaper is removed, some with a steamer and some with this enzyme goop from Home Depot. They seem to work about equally well.
- The cement is gone from the front hallway.
- The stick-on linoleum is gone from the second-floor hallway.
- The doorway at the top of the stairs, and the drywall enclosing the bannister, are gone.
- The electricians are about half done, and we had the bright idea today to ask them to fish phone cable along with the new electrical cables. Moderate extra charge.
- The new light fixtures are all chosen.
- The kitchen has been measured by the Ikea people.
- The floor refinishers are booked.
- The garage door missed me when it fell off its tracks with an enormous crash, and is now repaired.
- The now-ex-upstairs kitchen floor is exposed. This meant taking out a layer of tile and a layer of linoleum on quarter-inch ply. Many methods were tried; the best involved patient poking and prying with a pickaxe. I bought a cheap pickaxe a couple of years ago to clear some stubborn ice, and wondered if I was wasting my $18 or so, but it's proven its worth in this reno.
- The energy auditor has come and gone. I made the mistake of calling in the energy auditor to the Melita house after I'd made a lot of improvements - this time, we established the baseline on the unimproved house.
- We have lots and lots of plaster repair to do.
- We're looking for plumbers and drywallers - any suggestions?

I renovate, therefore I am

- The new house has (or had) a tile floor in the front hallway laid over the original hardwood in a bed of two inches of concrete.

- The solution to this problem involves a pickaxe (used gently to pry and lever, though the traditional swooping stroke was tried, if only out of frustration). And a lot of patience.

- We have a need for traffic control of dumpsters on the front lawn. (the roofers' dumpster vs. our dumpster)

That is all for now.