On the weekend of May 12 and 13 Margarit and I spent our first night at the new cottage. It is far from finished, but we had an air mattress set up in one of the bedrooms. The cottage is still just a shell, drywalled, ready for paint. There is power outside on a temporary panel, and we had an extension cord strung in to the building. It was a warm weekend, which was a good thing because we had no heat. It got a little chilly early in the morning, but wasn't too bad. We also had no running water, just a jug we brought along. We had a cooler with some food, and cooked on the BBQ. So, needless to say it was kind of a rustic weekend.
It was a weekend of another first as well. We decided to leave all three of our girls at home in the city on their own, for the first time. They had the house stocked up with a bunch of food, and they had a list of chores what they were supposed to work on while we were gone.
Margarit and I had the truck loaded completely full of stuff, and had one of the ATV's behind us on the utility trailer. When we arrived in Nordegg about 1:00 on Saturday we set about unloading and unpacking everything. This included our food and sleeping stuff. It also included a whole bunch of tools and materials for the cottage. We had 13 gallons of paint, enough to hopefully put two coats on all the new drywall. We worked Saturday until evening, and then most of the day on Sunday. We managed to get about 4-1/2 gallons put on by the end of the weekend. It was slow going because we are using three different colors, and there are at least two colors in every room. This required a lot of brush work to cut in the corners and at the upper edges where the walls meet textured ceiling. But we got two coats put on the three bedrooms, plus a single coat put on the living room. We also got a start on the stairway, the entry, the bathroom and the bay window. As with the insulation and vapor barrier we left all the high walls until last, so this will take longer. Whenever we get out there again we hope to get about the next third of the painting done. This should see us finished and ready for flooring and other work sometime in June.
While we were out there we took a short ATV ride around the subdivision. There were deer all over the place and we saw four of five groups of three or more during that short evening ride. We also rode up to the old quarry and picked through all the rock debris up there. We found a bunch of thin slabs that will work as a floor under our wood stove. We brought a load back to the cottage in the ATV and next time we're out we'll grab another one. That should provide us enough material to finish the job.
There were a few people out at the cottages in the subdivision but it was extremely quiet. Everyone just kind of kept to themselves and there was very little traffic. We really enjoyed the peace and tranquility and had our first fire of the season going in our fire pit. We set up two new Adirondack chairs that we brought out. We had our morning coffee there on Sunday morning and really enjoyed how calm and relaxing it was. Although there wasn't any large wildlife hanging around our property this time, there were a lot of birds. Robins, Chickadees, Juncos and some Hairy woodpeckers were drumming on dead trees throughout the subdivision, probably a territorial courtship display. In the past we never noticed that many birds around... just the ever present Ravens. Now that so many of the lots have had building sites cleared the birds seem to be attracted to the mix of dense woods and open clearing. Hopefully we see a population increase in the coming years.
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