The 2020 roller coaster!

Greetings and felicitations to you all.

What a Covid-19 roller coaster of a year 2020 was.  Optimistically, in spite of the exponential rise in cases over this northern hemisphere winter, vaccinations in 2021 might provide all of us with a gradual return to a level of social mingling and travel that bears at least some resemblance to a time “Before Covid.” 

It’s a long time since my last update on 22 May and I know I had said I would write again in September, so to summarise my “reasons in writing” as follows: 

• My part time consulting contract ramped up significantly in March, most months approaching and occasionally exceeding the 100 hours per month I had hoped for but never received in the previous year, and that has kept me fully occupied for at least 6 hours a day, four days per week. 
• The neck pain issues and associated occipital neuralgia continue to take up much time, with visits to my local physiotherapy and massage therapist, plus every 4 – 6 weeks a 3½-4 hour drive each way to a pain specialist in Nelson for trigger point therapy, and early September a 6½ hour drive to a neurologist in Kelowna for an initial nerve block. 
• Covid-19 disruptions to the normal process of life and getting anything done. 

In spite of all that, I have still had spare time to enjoy life out here in the mountains and my grand abode, time to do all that has to be done domestically to keep this place clean, plus trips into town to use the gym four times a week.  But not much time left to get on with what remains to be done to finish the house. i.e. the trimming out the doors, windows and baseboards (skirting boards) downstairs in the daylight walkout basement, entrance lobby, stairwell and laundry, let alone external landscaping. I even still have to sort through and hang all my pictures that remain stacked against walls downstairs.  The sum of all that is that by start of September there really wasn't much house finishing progress to report on in a blog update.

 

In spite of Covid-19, summer here was a good one, with plenty of outdoor six foot distanced G&T’s and beers with some of my Calgary neighbours who had moved out of the city to their holiday homes at the start of the initial lockdown and schools closure, remaining here in our own bubble until September.  Weather was typically excellent for this semi arid region, and we had a below average year for wildfires, which after the records set in 2017 and 2018 was a welcome relief from the additional worries re Covid. Nevertheless wildfires raged and hit records in the USA states south and south west of me, particularly in Washington, Oregon and California, and this side of Canada endured ten days early September shrouded in stifling thick smoke from the USA fires, totally obscuring my view of the lake and mountains.  

As for the finishing trim work downstairs, as both my mothers planned visit in May and other UK friends in June had to be postponed by at least a year due to Covid-19, the pressure was off, and that allowed me to place more focus on making an income.  I did make a start downstairs in July in anticipation of friends moving from Ottawa to Victoria calling in on their drive across Canada, but when they decided to fly and have the car shipped across, I diverted from that task. I will show the before and after contrast when the job is complete in my next update. The other big internal task in terms of trimming the stairs and adjacent gable windows that look under the over deck roof needs scaffolding and a head for heights (something I am not keen on), and I am still trying to get a contractor to quote.  

 

However, I did make an initial start on landscaping.  The choice had to be whether to start at the front or back of the house, and I ultimately decided that the builders’ near junkyard status at the back would be my priority.  The following two photographs make my point about the mess – one of weeds, a cut away into the hill to ensure a flat area behind the house, lots of building detritus, and fir cones.

The plan here involves four component parts that will take me into part of next summer to complete, but the end result should vastly improve the appearance and utility of this area. 

The first component is the building of a loose drystone rock facing and retaining wall against that bank, using the rough shaped boulders that I had initially tried to use two years earlier on the front patio wall. This provided me with plenty of hard physical work, both moving those rocks from the pile I had dumped at the front of the house two years ago and up the hill at the side of the house by wheelbarrow, plus numerous wheelbarrow loads of one inch drain rock ...

... then lifting the rocks into place, removing them, trying another position, all to achieve the best fit, plus shovelling in drain rock behind the rocks.  The drain rock ensures rain or melt water can drain away without saturating the earth behind and ultimately pushing the wall over.  Further mitigation against such a risk was to gradually slope the wall into the hill and place every fourth or fifth rock at 90 degrees into the ground behind as “dead man” anchors.  Thank you UTube and Pinterest.  Having seen the Muley Deer, who frequently hide from the summer heat behind the house, take fright if I come out and disturb them, jump up the wall without mishap, I am fairly confident my wall is stable.    

 

With work and the other distractions I mentioned earlier, I have only had the time to commit at best a day a week to this task, not helped by the fact that it was often just too hot.  As an example, on one afternoon, having finished paid work around 2 PM I turned to the rock wall task.  It was 36 deg C and a very dry heat.  Despite forcing myself to drink water every 10-15 minutes, I wasn’t obviously sweating and therefore wasn't aware of how much fluid I was losing, and within 1½ hours had a dizzy spell and realised it might be best if I stopped.  

 

The second component was to pour a concrete slab patio extending 10 feet from the rear wall and sloped or graded so as to take any precipitation away, and also to provide a clean walk area behind the house so I am not traipsing mud and snow into the house in winter with my firewood.  The precipitation problem became obvious the year before, both from snow melt on the hill behind, and with those almost tropical strength deluges we sometimes get late spring and early summer.  In the latter case the volume of water sometimes pouring down the rear roof valley is so large that it overshoots the eaves trough and drain and pours out like a waterfall, pooling about four to five feet from the back of house, and thereafter leaving a long term damp patch as that area is mainly in shade. That is not wise near a basement wall, as if the waterproofing membrane fails or the concrete wall cracks I could end up with damp ingress downstairs.  

 

The scale of this work was such that in September I contracted out much of this work.  I got Dwight Hulbert to do the initial ground work excavation, compacting and forms ... 

... Jocommo of Cen-Con to do the concrete pour and broom brush finish (the option of a stamped slate finish like on my front patio was too expensive), and Zip Line Pumping to pump the concrete from the concrete truck at the front of the house up the hill to the back.

The white vertical pipe you can see in some of the photos was purely a temporary measure to prevent possible rain coming down the rain chain spattering the concrete while curing in its first few days.  

Last day of September the concrete pour was complete.  A week later Dwight filled a trench at its edge with a temporary gravel fill. 

 

The third component is that separate 12 ft wide by 8 ft deep concrete slab you can see in the photographs.  I have two possible plans still developing here.  Either to put a post and beam roof over that as a winter firewood store and rock paving slabs embedded in gravel as a walk way from the patio, or alternatively build an outdoor wood fired oven on that pad with either an open pergola or a covered roof.  In trying to decide which, I am also considering the alternative of just buying a Komodo Big Green Egg smoker https://biggreenegg.ca that I would then put on the main over garage covered concrete deck next to my gas BBQ.  DC and Holly, as the experts on such matters, standby for my seeking your input and steer ahead of your visit.   

https://www.mannafromdevon.com/cookery-courses/woodfired/

 

The fourth component is a tentative plan to fence this area in. As some know, I have been considering getting a dog for a long time, but I won’t do that until the house is properly finished and I therefore have more time to appreciate a dog. Nor until I have a fenced area behind the house to let it out into first thing in the morning and last thing in the evening, so that it can't then tear off on an errant night-time chase after the elk, deer or wild turkeys, let alone picking a fight with a bear or cougar.  

Work on the backyard project has inevitably stopped for the winter, but my intentions from next spring are to first complete the build of the stacked rock wall and whichever I decide on in terms of a wood fired oven or wood shed, then get Dwight to install a perforated drain tube buried in gravel along that patio edge which will take any moisture away and out to the hill beyond the side of the house, and finally place and grade a gravel dressing as a finishing to the non concreted area between the rock wall to the patio slab.       

 

So that outdoor work is about all I have achieved on house finishing this year.  

Part of late August and through September was also taken up with the annual forage on crown land for dead wood to chop and split as my winter firewood, and some essential external maintenance before winter, especially on my front wood deck guard rails which were peeling and cracking in the intense sun, otherwise I’d be replacing them in the next two years.  

I also had to make two gable vents for the front porch dormer roof and get Dwight to fit these, as evidence last winter of some frosting around the lower vents indicated the venting in this particular roof section was insufficient.  A long story but one of three contractors involved in building that particular part of my roof had failed to mention that the hidden ridge beam on that section precluded the option for the ridge venting, as is fitted elsewhere to the main roof sections, and therefore left me with a problem to find out!  Roof venting allows any condensing moisture to escape, and is essential in all climates, unless you have a "hot roof" (a complete misnomer) such as in the design of my loft shed dormer, otherwise long term moisture could lead to structural damage. This venting is especially important in extreme sub zero winter climates.

Before Covid my intentions had always been to take a large part of this winter away to visit family and friends in UK and friends in Oman, and do a road trip to the southern states of the USA. But with current international flight travel restrictions, and the Canada US border having been shut since the start of this debacle, such plans have to be delayed until at least winter 21/22.  So, ahead of the predictable exponential rise in cases over the winter, start of October I took a break and took a 16 day BC road trip to Vancouver Island. A two day drive to the island, three nights with my friends who had just moved from Ottawa to Victoria, (like me they are without kids and v careful on who with and how they socialise), a call on but not a stay with another ex RN friend in Nanaimo, plus 2-3 days stays in Port Renfrew, Ucluelet and Tofino on the Pacific coast.  Here is a selection of my photographs of that tour.

The first six are between Victoria and Port Renfrew at Sandcut Beach.

The following are at Port Renfrew, the most westerly point in Canada. I spent two nights in this area, staying in a glam Yurt overlooking the sea inlet below, and in the tiny resort town using the excellent restaurant bar in the Port Renfrew hotel.

While in Port Renfrew I went for an excellent half day walk Avatar Grove, a preserved old growth temperate rain forest.  There is no old growth remaining where I live in the East Kootenays.  The immensity of some of the ancient trees makes one feel very reflective, even small in terms of our time and place on this planet.

These next photos were taken on a walk along the wild Pacific shore in Ucluelet.

And the following are scenes on Five Mile Beach near Tofino, where I spent two cathartic hours walking to one end and back, enjoying the space and ambience. 

While socially things were inevitably limited as everyone was masked up in restaurants and in their own bubble, it was still fun to people watch, and I left Tofino after three days totally relaxed and refreshed. The west coast of the island was an area I had considered when initially thinking through my move from Ontario to BC back in 2015-16, but simply put, with land being at a premium and costing three to four times what it does here in the East Kootenays, the added expense of getting building materials onto the island and then moving it across on a minor road to the remote west coast, and the engineering required to build a house in a very high risk earthquake zone, let alone much of the best sites being at risk of the next 300 year tsunami to hit this coast, that option was beyond my financial means.  I shall nevertheless look forward to more road trips out there in the coming years.

Departing Tofino in a major Pacific gale dumping 100mm plus of rain in 12 hours, I spent a day driving back east across the island to get the ferry back to the mainland, then two days leisurely driving 1000 km back across BC, through five mountain passes, the Similkameen Valley ...  

...and Okanagan wine region to home here in the East Kootenays. Overall the trip was the recharge I needed before settling down into "splendid isolation" for this Covid winter. 

What do I make of my winter in isolation?  The main focus remains my contract consulting work, regular gym trips (as long as Covid statistics remain low in the interior of BC and they are allowed to stay open), on-going medical trips fro my neck issues, Netflix binging, reading good books while curled up on my leather sofas in front of the wood burning stove, plus Zoom / Skype / FaceTime / WhatsApp calls to keep me socially engaged.  In spite of all, I count myself as lucky and hopefully rather safer than anybody living in a city, let alone those going mental in an apartment that is smaller than my loft bedroom.  My isolation pales into insignificance when I consider those in the front line or my brother trying to maintain his role as a school teacher in Rio where infections are out of control, thanks to another President in denial and overcrowded favelas.    

Having ripped, sanded and stained quite a lot of trim material in September outside while the weather still allowed, I should also be able to gradually work on trimming out of the downstairs daylight walkout basement one this winter, and the laundry and adjacent washroom. I hope to have that to show in my next update in April.   

I am, in spite of the quiet and unusually socially restricted life Covid-19 has imposed, content. Most of my Calgary neighbours have decided to yet again escape the city while the cases there surge exponentially.  I have in the last 10 days managed to have two outdoor slightly chilly drinkex socials with two sets but I have declined so far to socialise indoors, and won't until I am very sure they are not having other visitors from Calgary and therefore adhering to a small social bubble. So, entirely cheerful in these strange times, rest assured, there is no danger of me being seen walking through the ranch doing a Black Adder WW 1 impersonation with two pencils stuffed up my nose and my underpants on my head, shouting “wibble” at the wildlife. 

I know most readers in UK, Canada and Australia will know who Blackadder is or was, but this link provides an explanation for those elsewhere in the world. http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/blackadder/episodes/four/four_goodbyee.shtml

That is all until my next update in April where I aim to show you the finished downstairs suite and main floor laundry.  Stay safe.  I wish you all seasonal greetings and a rather better 2021 than we had in 2020.