Construction Update - July 24th

More progress today !!

The electrician showed up to do the wiring. This is Mike from Ben's Electric.

Turns out, a couple of weeks ago Mike won 2nd place in the Trades Skills competition in Alberta. He was awarded his certificate by TV home improvement celebrity Mike Holmes from 'Holmes on Homes'.

Pretty cool, and great to have someone with Mike's skills doing work on our house. Besides, he's a really nice guy!



Susan and our contractor, Jim, have this running banter about nifty tools - Jim isn't allowed to show me the next 'greatest tool ever'.

Here's an example. In this photo, Joe is running in 5" spikes with a percussion nail driver that's about the size of a palm sander. The nails are pushed in effortlessly as if through styrofoam. Joe taps the nails in with a hammer first to get them started, as you can see in the row above, and then pushes them all in. Really amazing.


It does make a lot of noise, though, hence the ear protection.

With this nail driver, Joe is installing 2x3 strapping on the inside of the insulated 2x6 walls. That way the electrical stuff is installed within this strapping rather than in the 2x6 walls, which would disturb the vapor barrier. It's a great wall construction method, very energy efficient (you can heat the room with a Bic lighter - almost :))


Our windows for the new addition arrived this afternoon - in the rain. The weather has been awful. Today we heard that July, so far, has been the coldest and wettest on record, ever!! Today it never got over 10 C. And drizzle for the best part of the afternoon and evening. And, it's supposed to stay this way for the next two weeks.

But, I digress. We must find the humour in things where we can. Such as in the slogan on the back of this Northerm Windows truck - "Just a stone's throw away". Click on the photo for a better look. (then click the 'back' button)



Whitehorse, the Yukon for that matter, seems to have lots of these great slogans. Our daily newspaper, the Whitehorse Star, has the slogan Illegitimus Non Carborundum (Latin for, "Don't let the bastards grind you down."). But the one I like best is at The Radiator Shop, whose logo has a cartoon of a little guy having a 'wizz' and the slogan, "A great place to take a leak".