Nov
16
2005
November 2005
Cashew needed a place to stay just for one night; he was scheduled to be adopted the next day. In the short time we spent together, Cashew taught me an important lesson about myself.
He’s a wonderful little dog: housebroken, affectionate without being needy, gentle, obedient and quite funny. You couldn’t ask for a better all-round companion.
The one tiny problem is that … well, that he’s tiny. When I took him for walks, I felt the urgent need to explain to everyone who passed:
Actually, he’s not my dog … heh heh … yeah, I’m just fostering him … really, I’m a big-dog person…
Until Cashew came into my life, I had no idea of the depth of my shallowness.
He’s now living with people who deserve him.
Nov
14
2005
Now that the room is framed, we’re waiting for the house-lifters to de-lift the house. In the meantime, (royal) we are at work on drainage.
The basement floods even in a small rain, so Dan has a two-part strategy involving a French drain and some new downspouts. I probably won’t report voluminously about the downspout part — not that it isn’t intriguing or anything — and will focus instead on the French drain. Here it is in its newly dug trench in the basement:
Here’s the gravel that will cover it:
And here it is, looking invisible.
A drain doesn’t do much good unless it drains into something, so royal-we will install a sump pump. Never in all my years have I owned my very own sump pump! Here’s where Sumpy Allisonovitch’s new quarters will be built:
It started to rain within hours of digging Sumpy’s new home, immediately proving the merit of Dan’s strategy:
That was just a light rain, so it looks as though Sumpy will be one busy little sump pump:
I keep hoping that, with all this digging going on, royal-we will unearth some treasures, but so far this is all that’s surfaced:
After the guys went home for the evening, M and I snuck down to the construction site and explored in places we probably shouldn’t have:
Soon the evidence of the 1913 stairs will get sheer-walled over, so I had to take one last picture:
Just before we said goodbye to the new room for the evening, I took the action shot of M:
Nov
09
2005
Wednesday, two days after the concrete-pour, the framing begins. Robert works on the back where the door will go…
… while Vidal works on a side wall:
Soon, most of the vertical bits are in place:
Now there’s house where once there was none, and an unruly camelia has started to trip passers-by. (You can see it at the lower-right corner of the picture above.) EP, who has been gardening for a living, generously offers to trim it back a little.
By Thursday the framing is finished:
On Friday the sheer-walling is done:
I get my first real sense of what the room will be like: how much light and how much area.
Now, for the first time in its 35-year life, the addition is stable. For eight years I’ve worried about the thing collapsing; now I can stop. What am I gonna worry about now? I guess about paying for all this.
