Shirtsleeve Weather

We're just coming off a few days of the kind of cold that makes me think about survival. It was a bit unusual because there was wind as well as cold, with wind chill values around -40 to -50ºC. Today I was out running errands around noon, and it was only about -20º, and by late afternoon it was maybe -10.

Working in the sunroom this afternoon, Dad and I took off our jackets because it got too warm. There is some heat that leaks into that space from the rest of the house, but we keep the doors closed, and the one heating duct that feeds into it is closed off. Mostly the space is heated by the sun through the windows. Even during the extreme cold over the past few days, the sunroom has been cooling to only a couple of degrees below freezing over night, and warming nicely during the days. Today the heat flow was reversed: Garth opened up the doors into the rest of the house and turned the furnace off for a couple of hours.

The thermal performance of the new space has been improving bit by bit as we insulated the outside walls, closed in the gaps where warm air could rise right into the attic and away (big improvement there!), and finally started sealing all the walls up with vapour barrier. Today we were applying the last big sheets of poly and finishing the seams around windows. As we got down to the last little details, I noticed the sound of a big truck, engine braking somewhere nearby, and realized that the sound was much fainter than usual. With that thought, I also realized that the room had been feeling different over the last few hours. If someone had asked me, I might have said that I sensed it becoming more airtight, but in reality, what I sensed was probably just the gradual reduction in sound.

We are very pleased with the sunroom so far. Over the next couple of years, I hope to add a rock wall or perhaps water containers as thermal mass, to smooth out the heating and cooling cycle a bit. Insulated blinds or shutters are a big priority, too. If we can slow the heat loss overnight, I am hoping the room may become a significant heat source for the rest of the house.

And if you're wondering what it will be like in July, check out my post from 2006 about designing window overhangs. From what I saw of the rafter shadows on the window framing last summer, it looks like this is going to work, folks!

Was that Only Last Summer?

I've been promising pictures of the sunroom building project for several moons now. Tonight, on the full moon just after the winter solstice, many are gathered under old family roofs, but I stay on alone under my own roof. I am waiting until my church duties are completed before I too gather to the chosen family roof of this fast-passing year, and meanwhile, I am enjoying some quiet and tidying up some loose ends. Thanks to a nudge from Jim, I got browsing through pictures from the days when the newest part of our roof was only an idea awaiting a foundation.

It feels like these must have been taken more than just moons ago - feels more like several turns around the sun ago.

It was June 23rd. Garth and James were off in Calgary, having gathered with family by chartered coach to help celebrate his aunt and uncle's 50th wedding anniversary. I woke to the siren of the town fire truck, cheerily summoning the folk to the pancake breakfast. It was Fair Day in Arcola.

I burrowed back into my pillow, but something nagged at me. I tried to deny it, to pretend it could be something other than what I knew it must be, but finally I sprang from the bed with the mental admission that I was hearing thunder. Fair Day, indeed.

There was a huge round tarp in the garage, left by my Dad in case of just this circumstance. I dragged a rickety wooden ladder from behind the garage and propped it against the eave of the house where the porch used to be, forming a ridge pole for a makeshift tent over the exposed basement stairs. Then I looked at the partly rotted ladder rails, considered trusting them for a climb, but decided a sturdier second ladder was in order.

As I placed it, the thunder was getting louder, and I could see that the black cloud to the southwest was right on track for a direct hit.

Hammer, spikes, and tarp edges in hand, I started the climb.

The higher I climbed, the more weight of the tarp came up off the ground and into reaction against my effort.

Raindrops started slicking the aluminum ladder rungs. Lightning flashed closer.

I pounded on the wall and yelled at my sleeping daughter to come help. With the hammer and nails out of my hands, and both of us tugging, the tarp finally relented and rose the last few feet I needed. I spiked the top in place under the eave, added some spikes lower on the wall to hold the tarp out to the sides, weighted down the bottom edges with concrete blocks borrowed from the nearby fire pit, and retreated inside.

Then I looked out to see how the tarp was doing, and saw all the water from the garage roof pouring, not into the rain barrel that used to sit behind the garage, but instead into the gravel-filled base we had excavated for a new concrete slab there.


It's amazing what functional structures a person can concoct under pressure. That's a sawhorse supporting a piece of plywood, with various bits of recently removed eavestrough and downspout and connectors balanced and wedged until they conducted the bulk of the water away from the slab base... and into the hole where the chokecherry bush (seen lying in the background) had been removed to make way for the coming concrete truck. I bailed that hole out later. More than once.

The garden sure needed the rain. My kitchen floor didn't. (Well, maybe it did.) The porch removal had inadvertently pulled the eavestrough slightly out of position, not enough so you would notice and remember to fix it on a sunny day, but enough so that the roof runoff from a thunderstorm came sheeting down over the kitchen doorway.

Looking out and down from my kitchen doorway, June 23rd.
The black tarp covers the basement stairs.

If there was any south wind with a storm, the water came sheeting into the doorway, and pushing in under the rubber sweep I had added to the bottom of the door, which was only an interior door after all, and was never intended for keeping out such elements. More than once a hapless family member shuffled into the kitchen during or after such a weather event and found the river with their feet. It crossed the whole kitchen and disappeared under the electric stove, but nothing electrifying happened. We tried to remember to keep some rags tucked up against the door when weather threatened, but that was about as successful as our remembering to fix the eavestrough. It did get done, several storms later.

The tarp did remarkably well at keeping the basement dry. Everyone wondered, though, why I had chosen to drag two tarp edges up the ladder, line up the grommets, and spike both edges in place, instead of unfolding the tarp and leaving more of it on the ground. Everyone wondered, including me. I guess I just had it in my head that a half-moon-shaped tarp would be perfect for the job, and didn't realize that a circle would do just as well, with the other half of the moon spread on the ground. Hey, I was about to climb an aluminum ladder in a thunderstorm. I was actively setting aside my intelligence for a while.

It worked, and I got back inside, safe and soggy. I dried myself off and got into my marching band uniform. By the time Ruth and I were on our way to the parade marshalling grounds, maybe six blocks away at the south end of Main Street, the storm was a distant bank of fluffy white in the east, and the sun was softening the pavement. We survived the march to the fairgrounds in our bright blue polyester jackets and felt-look western-style hats, as we always do. This time someone had arranged to have water waiting for us!

Ah, water. We do need it.

And the garage slab base was none the worse for waterlogging. As my Mom said, it's a good thing concrete likes water.



To be continued...

Of Form and Substance

Dad and I are building again, after a couple of weeks off for other things. Dad had to put in some ductwork in his house to get his ground-source heat pump working properly, and I had to catch up on neglected stuff like housecleaning and rest. I focussed on the second one.

Today as I surveyed the interior of the new walls, plump with yellow fiberglass insulation, and mentally reviewed the tasks yet undone, I realized how different this project is from much of my activities. This project involves substance. Often my creations are only form, only words or musical phrases, passing things that take shape only for a moment in the mind of a reader or listener and then pass away again. I can work away at the shaping and polishing of these forms, and if I never present them to anyone, they simply cease to be.

But when I stop working on this building project, it still sits there, substantial, unfinished, real.

I like this.

********

Speaking of the building, it's high time I posted some more pictures. Nudge me if I don't get some up soon.

That Chill in the Air . . .

. . . and that smell of heated dust as the furnace starts up for the first time this season. I put it off as long as I could, and we're leaving the thermostat low, even though it makes for somewhat clumsy typing fingers. The original house is still closed in, but it's not quite as weather resistant as it used to be. And once we get the new part closed in, there will be a spell when I don't want it heating much, until we get the vapour barrier in to prevent condensation in the walls. Eek. 'Tis the season of desperately hard work before freeze-up.

Speaking of weather, I found a new source of online weather forecasts. I have used Environment Canada for years now, but in these days of eyes on the sky, I grew envious when I heard talk of a 14-day forecast. The Weather Network clearly uses the same observation stations, but they seem much more willing to go out on a limb with more detailed and extended forecasts. So far, I think the Environment Canada temperature predictions are closer to the mark, and the 14-day predictions are only a rough guide, but still useful.

If you're marveling at the temperature differences showing up between Moose Mountain Park in the hills and Carlyle on the flats nearby, look closer. The actual observations come from Broadview and Estevan respectively.

That brings up another issue. I have a CD of weather data for western Canada, and browsing through that, my impression is that the number of stations collecting weather information has declined steeply in recent decades. Does that seem odd to you? Here we are, all concerned about rapid climate change and perturbed regional weather patterns and more erratic weather events, and at the same time, we are relying on an increasingly sparse net of stations to tell us what is actually happening on the ground.

And in these days of increasing emphasis on "citizen science," I couldn't find anything on the Environment Canada website about opportunities for citizens to make weather observations, except the Skywatchers program for schools. I know Garth's uncle submits weather observations. I'll ask him.

But I won't be volunteering this fall!

Porch Tales

I've been promising some pictures of the house addition in progress. Trouble is, if I'm not out there running one of my dad's power tools (which I use because he has them, and he buys because I can use them . . . sigh), I'm in here doing the bare minimum to keep folks fed and clean-ish, or maybe flitting through the garden pulling the biggest of the big weeds and making mental notes (soon to be forgotten) about what needs harvesting. Oh, I'll confess there are other times, too, times when I just sag into a chair, or rare times when I get out my bike and try to get as far away from work as possible. And yes, I must confess that I still spend a fair amount of time at this computer screen, but something seems to stop me from working on those pictures - ah, working - that must be it. Work aversion again. If I told myself I'd be "playing with" the pictures, perhaps I'd get at it.

Where to begin? Good thing I have Dad working with me, because he doesn't waste much time worrying about that. I could spend the whole summer trying to plan the exact sequence of every task, and never get started at all, but Dad asks a few questions, makes sure he won't be doing harm, and starts.


The porch had to come off. While I fussed and fiddled about, rerouting the electrical wiring that ran through it, Dad took out the door and windows, broke away the tiles and pavement around the base of the walls, and started in with his chain saw. He left the corners intact until last, and broke them with a sledge hammer. With some jacking and prying, the whole thing started to come away from the house, but not without some binding at the eaves.

Nothing some timbers, a chain, and a truck couldn't fix.


With some old round fence posts underneath the side walls as rollers, we got it moving. The walls were quite solidly built, with ship-lap inside and out, but it was never intended to serve as a rolling surface. Dad kept nailing and re-nailing heavier lumber on the sides, but it kept twisting off and then the rollers would cut into the shiplap and an edge would meet the ground and the whole thing would come to a swift and sometimes alarming halt. We wanted to move the porch to the side of the yard where it could serve as temporary shelter for salvaged bits of building materials, but after a full day of intermittent dragging, we decided we had moved it far enough to get on with other things.

So we started digging to make way for some new concrete slabs, and Dad, always looking for a faster way, brought his tractor into town. Somebody got the bright idea that there might be a faster way to move that porch.

Yes, this might work.

So far, so good . . .



Oops.

Well, it's nothing a front-end loader can't fix.



There! Good as new, right?

Well, maybe she looks a little rough around the edges.

That bright strip in the shadows inside is the reflector on my bike trailer, originally purchased for hauling small children on joy rides, but still in service a decade later as a grocery hauler. The trees make a nice back wall for our new shed.

All this happened back in June. Yesterday I rescued a charming wild kitten from the roof of that porch. The little one was mewing up and down, back and forth, while mama yelled encouragement from the ground. When I approached, the kitten hid in the hole at the right, between the two layers of the roof. I put a ladder up against the wall, and mama kept up a low growl in the background. Once I backed off, though, that kitten didn't hesitate. I wish I could come off a roof onto a ladder so boldly - though the change of speed and direction at ground level looked a little sharper than I would like, if it were me. But the subsequent run across the yard to mama with tail straight skyward told me that the kitten was quite content.

Much has changed where the porch formerly sat, but that will have to wait for another day . . .

Future and Past

My days are full of newness: planning, figuring, shaping, and raising the walls of the greenhouse/sunroom/passive solar heat source that we are adding to our house.

Sometimes I still open the kitchen door and stop myself abruptly, before I step into the open air expecting the steps that aren't there anymore.

(To reassure the safety conscious, I'll mention that there is a scaffold right in front of the doorway at chest level, so I'd have to be almost comatose to actually walk out and hurt myself.)

These last few days there are more confused moments, as we have compressed all the living room and office furniture into half of the living/office room, and added a bedroom of sorts into the other half. We had to move out of our old bedroom before the plaster dust got too bad - that room is becoming the living room eventually, but right now it is a construction zone. Still, sometimes when I am on a mission to find a certain object, I open the old bedroom door and step halfway into the empty, plaster-strewn, open-air room before I realize that my bedroom is elsewhere now. Stranger still is the sensation of sitting at this computer (now facing east in the northeast corner of the living room instead of facing west in the southwest corner) with my perceptual world shrunk to the glowing screen and the keys, and then hearing a noise outside. Who is thumping in my back yard? No, wait, I'm facing east; that sound is coming from the street out front.

Confusing though it may be, I am thriving on the change, the puzzling out of how best to shape our lives in this space, and the sheer thrill of making something - something lasting and big.

So I find it very hard to shift gears and tackle the pile of dusty old cardboard boxes that couldn't sit in the back of my closet anymore. I now have no room for this stuff. None. Well, there are places where some of it can be tucked in - the bits that actually belong in my life today and tomorrow and next year. But that tucking will require more culling: a few inches of bookshelf cleared here, a bit of file cabinet emptied there.

And I don't want to do it.

I want to build the new, not deal with the old.

It is so tempting to just tip it all into the garbage.

But as I start poking through it, I find family photos, and letters from old friends I should contact before I lose touch with them completely, and oh, the piles of good stuff to read. But there is always more good stuff to read. Should I just let this stuff go?

And so I flounder, and set the boxes aside again.

I wonder. This house I am building - will I someday be struggling, waffling, wondering whether to let it go?

Googling the Vestibule

Now that the dimensions of the building addition are cast in concrete, I am getting down to the design details. A little late, no? Yep. Trying to make a vestibule fit in the corner, and still have room between it and the basement stairs for a utility sink, I got looking on the 'Net for ideas about minimum dimensions for the vestibule.

"Vestibule dimensions" turns up some interesting international building code stuff, but that's aimed at public buildings with high traffic. Then there are a couple of scientific articles, one having to do with ions and mouse lymphocytes (cool, but I don't have time to begin to understand it) and another with floral morphology and pollination (oh, yes, I vaguely remember something about a "vestibule" in a flower - again, no time for that). Scrolling on down, I find more building design stuff, but I also start to see product specs and reviews for backpacker's tents. Nope, no time for backpacking, definitely not.

Soon I start to see more scientific articles, this time about the inner ear. Makes sense. Scroll on, scroll on.

The link that startles me is "Ezekiel 40." Well, sure, now that I think of it, there are some vestibule dimensions in there.

Okay, I think I've pursued this wild google chase long enough. Time for common sense. Make the doors swing out of the vestibule, not into it, and remember to leave enough room for all four of us bending over to take boots off all at once. Then again, we could take turns...

Blogwriting Analysis

What does your handwriting say about YOU?

The results of your analysis say:

You plan ahead, and are interested in beauty, design, outward appearance, and symmetry.
You are a social person who likes to talk and meet others.
You are affectionate, passionate, expressive, and future-oriented.
You are a talkative person, maybe even a busybody!
You enjoy life in your own way and do not depend on the opinions of others.

Well, Madcap, I got the "busybody" thing too. And I am definitely not talkative; ask anyone I know - they'll tell you all about how I just sit back and blend into the furnishings at a party (if I even go), and they might mention how they haven't seen me in ages, and then when I did show up at a church event I kept babbling on about all sorts of trivial things that happen in my daily life . . .

Hmm. Maybe I've changed. Or maybe I need to get out more.

That first item in the results actually struck me as pretty accurate, but hehehe, look at my hasty, unplanned, asymmetrical scribble there. Seems pretty clear to me that you could take the handwriting test without even doing the writing part - just answer the questions according to your dream vision of your own handwriting, and away you go.

Now for the more interesting analysis. The data: I got up shortly after 5:30 a.m. this morning, hurried through some breakfast and then worked fast and hard all day (well, I did pause to eat a sandwich, while standing in the yard beside the concrete forms and wondering if we would have everything ready before the ready-mix truck showed up), finally sat down to some pizza (kindly ordered in by my brother-in-law) sometime after 7:30 p.m., creaked my way back up out of the chair and went back out to tidy up in the yard and make sure all the freshly troweled concrete was covered up to keep it wet, came in, went to bed, got up thirsty, asked why the computer was still on, and wound up here in the midst of this blog post at 11 p.m. What does all this say about me?

Illich and My Garden

I found an archive of writing by Ivan Illich. I love his analysis of the number of hours put into owning and operating a car in a year, and the mileage gotten out of it. Divide the miles by the hours and you get about five miles per hour. Might as well walk!

This summer I have been resorting to a lot of powered and packaged conveniences in hopes of completing a renovation project quickly, before winter comes swirling in through the gaping hole that will soon be cut in the house wall. Ultimately that hole should let in a lot of sunlight and help keep the house warm, but only after a lot of framing and roofing and installing of windows and such. I'm in a hurry, and Dad has the tools, so I'm using them.

But I couldn't give up my garden, not even for one season. This winter I tried out the Ecological Footprint Calculator and realized that the environmental impact of food transportation is even larger than I thought. So I garden, stubbornly. There are some pictures over at my garden blog. I used to call it The Daily Bed, but now it's The Occasional Bed - still just as many beds, but less time talking.

Ready or Not

Use the front door these days, folks.