Smiles On Our Faces

It's been a few weeks since the Catagory 1 winds hit and destroyed most of our yard. In the midst of losing almost everything we've worked for over the last few years building our dream house and studio in Craik, , we've had to take stock on where our lives are at...

- We've got two beautiful, wonderful children
- We have wonderful friends
- We have good, wholesome food on our table and in our freezer
- We have more determination and will power to continue than ever before.

So what did we lose?....We lost some stuff! We lost some "stuff" that can be replaced, but the things that can't be taken away are still in our hearts, and we wear them in our smiles...

And so the building continues...

The past two weeks have been eventful, fruitful, frustrating, wet, hot, cold, rainy, dry and all around tiring and oh so satisfying. We've been working on trying to finish off services in our guest house and after months of work, we're finally there. Two weeks ago, we finally had warm enough weather to finish trenching the cistern in for our water system. It was +22 C the day I chose to dig the trench and hole for the tank. To my surprise, I still found frost at 3 feet deep. After carefully removing the layers of silt that had washed down my trench from spring run off, I also managed to find the sewage pipes I laid last fall...and like all good plans, I found them with the teeth on the bucket of the backhoe. Ce la vie! It took about 3 days to finish tunelling, trenching, laying pipe, wrapping everything in insulation, tieing in, priming pumps, pressure testing, and finally bringing the water and sewage systems on-line. Oh what a treat! All of the plumbing is finally complete and the bathroom is fully functional. We still have tile to do in the shower but hope to have that completed before the end of May.

This past weekend was met with traditional Craik spring weather. We had 4 solid days of rain and snow mixed with 40 - 50 Km/hr winds. I made the mistake of tearing out the brick fireplace on Thursday. We chose to replace it instead with a wood stove. We've been waiting for warmer weather to do the change out and since Audrey and the kid's stayed in the city an extra 2 days this week, I thought I'd take the opportunity to get the cement poured. Thursday was a day of enormous work and at 11:30 pm, I found myself still trowelling wet cement. I planned on hitting it one more time with the trowel for a glass finish and figured it would be ready at by about 1:00 am to do...unfortunately, the next thing I remember is waking up at 6:00 am the next day seeing my breath. It was just above freezing, and my cement was well on the way to curing. Later that day I installed the new stove and started warming the guest house up before the rest of the family got there. It was so rewarding to stand back and finally see months of work finally coming together. There is still so much finishing work to do, but at least we can see light at the end of the tunel...and I'm pretty sure its not a freight train!

A huge thank you to our very good friend Lee who drove all the way from Prince Albert to help us do clean up after the storm. We hit the mess at 10:00 am and by 10:30 I was done. I wanted to be anywhere but there...Lee kept telling me how much we had accomplished, how good everything looked, how much was salvageable, and by the afternoon, he had me back on track of believing in what we were doing. We all need some good friends like that in our lives to keep us going when we feel like packing it in. Thank you my friend!

Another huge thank you to the Katimavik team that came the next day. The group above did an amazing job of digging trees, pulling nails, sorting straw, yanking out broken beams and again, encouraging us to continue. Thank you to this amazing group of upcoming adults.

Our cistern gets sited in the excavated hole. It will be buried 6 1/2 feet deep to withstand the winter freeze. The top foot will have to be insulated and covered over with wood. Because of the type of tank complete burial for frost protection would result in it collapsing, so we need work arounds for it.

Another picture of the lines running up to the guest house

  

 The hot and cold water manifolds installed, pressure tested and waiting to come on-line 

The new wood stove. We made a combination of mistakes with our masonary burner. We did not line the fire box with fire brick or steel, plus over fired the stove to almost 900 degrees a few times trying to warm the place up this past winter. The result was cracked mortar joints and brittle bricks. We could write a book on the things we've learned NOT to do :)

  

 Audrey waiting patiently for her hubby to finish taking photos so we could get back home to Saskatoon.

  

With plumbing complete it's onto the next task of electricals and flooring. Because we are living / storing / building in this place, EVERYTHING is done in small steps and everything is worked on in small stages together since something always has to be moved out of the way to work in that area. We've learned to do as much in an area as we can to minimize the amount of "stuff" moving we have to do.

 In the midst of everything else, we've started incubating 69 eggs from our chickens. After a week we candled some of them with promising results. Stay tuned to see if we have some peeping or "ripe" eggs in a few more weeks :)