We celebrated Canada's 150th anniversary at our property in Nordegg. Since the official holiday fell on a Saturday, I chose to close my business for a four day long weekend. I light of the recent issues at work, this will likely be the extent of my vacation time for the foreseeable future.
The girls finished school on Thursday June 29th. It was our intention to head out of town on Friday June 30th. It didn't quite happen that way.... We had a power outage in our garage, for some yet to be determined reason. We keep a freezer out there and as the outage wasn't noticed right away, we lost a freezer full of food. This all happened the day before we were scheduled to leave... yet more to be heaped upon our plates.... Margarit and I were both wiped out from a week of long hours at work. I had to head to Calgary at 5:30AM on Thursday, in order to make it to a 9:00AM jobsite meeting for a project that we are tendering. Margarit had the morning off as she had to take Hailey to write a final exam, and then attended Anna's grade six graduation. She made it in to work around the same time that I did, upon my return from Calgary., on Thursday afternoon. Michele did an admiral job holding things down in our absence. I ended up staying at work well into the evening on Thursday to try and wrap up all the loose ends before the long weekend.
We just couldn't drag ourselves out of bed at a respectable hour on Friday. We took a much needed sleep in day and finally got mobile by about 10:00AM. By the time we got everything packed up and hit the road for Nordegg, it was about 3:00 in the afternoon. We finally arrived at our property out in Nordegg in the early evening. Our development permit, building permit, and electrical permit are all now in place. A temporary power panel was hooked up on the property on Thursday. We now can plug in our trailer when we stay at the property. This also provides power for the construction of our buildings.
Site clearing and excavation were completed some time ago. Our contractor has just completed setting the forms for the footings for our new cottage. In fact, a couple of his guys worked on Monday to finish up the rebar in advance of the concrete pour that is scheduled for Tuesday.
We rented a 27 Ton Hydraulic Log Splitter on Saturday and Margarit and I spent the better part of the day splitting a pile of logs that were stacked near the entrance to our driveway. These were mostly last years logs, from the clearing that was undertaken to put in our driveway and electrical supply. Our contractor brought in a processor that cut up all the trees to stove length logs. We split all the ones that were along our driveway, but there are two big piles of logs remaining, all from the clearing of our building site. We will rent the log splitter again on a least a couple more occasions, to clean up these piles as well. For now we have s stack of split firewood that is approx. 6 feet wide, 12 feet long and 5 feet high. We will leave this to season, and will use it both for outdoor campfires, and in the future to heat our cottage.
Almost all of the lots on the upper side of Tamarack Trail are now sold. Since we purchased ours almost a year ago to the day, ten or eleven more have sold. We now have a number of new neighbors, and are no longer all alone at our end of the subdivision. Two doors west of us a family from Sylvan Lake bought a lot in January and already have their foundation in and cabin framed up. Our next door neighbors to the west have not started anything on their property yet. To the east of us, we met our new neighbor Daniel. He was out for the weekend with some friends, and his two large dogs... Fezzik, a border collie cross and Seamus, a big Burmese Mountain dog. The girls were thrilled to heap their attention onto these two gentle canines.
After spending Saturday splitting our big pile of wood, we relaxed for the rest of the weekend. We spent some time stacking our fire wood but other than that, not a lot of work took place. We visited with our friends Shelley and Eric who have place down the road. And the girls went out for a bunch of ATV rides. We actually took two vehicles out for the weekend. I drove one of my trucks and pulled our travel trailer out to the property. Margarit drove my second truck and pulled out a flat deck trailer that I borrowed from work [again] and we hauled out our ATV. We made arrangements to leave the ATV at a local storage site, so that we don't have to continue to haul it back and forth.
The concrete pour of our footings is scheduled for Tuesday. Once the concrete cures and the forms get stripped, our contractor will be setting the ICF blocks for our foundation walls. Some of our neighbors commented that it looked like we had done a really crappy job of pouring a slab for our cabin. In fact this was the natural limestone shelf on our lot, and our contractor was challenged to set stepped forms for our footings. We hope to see the Insulated Contrete Walls poured later this month, and to have the framers get started soon. It's great to see things finally kicking into gear as we are anxious to get our construction project underway.
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