Doors week

Manu attacking the back door shed

A bonus from the shed: old boards that will be repurposed elsewhere in the house

RIP the shed

The brick having been sawed, the left opening is ready for the door frame

PF and Louis looking rather biblical while they install the first frame

The first door is in! View from the backyard

So much light

They're in!

What a week. I worked away stripping the stairs, I cleaned the exposed brick wall (yet again), Manu and I demolished the small shed off the basement back door, we put up a whole wall's worth of gyp rock... but it all faded into the background because this week was the week that the doors were installed!

Having paid a pretty penny for these lovely portes françaises we happily handed the job over to the very capable hands of Pierre. Mister organization himself, Pierre had the mason lined up the day after we took delivery and as an added bonus our two favorites Louis and PF would be doing the job.

We enjoy Louis and PF's company so much that we tend to forget that they are at the Tall House because we pay them. They are so easy to talk too and such a wealth of knowledge that time tends to slip by as we chat away together. It probably doesn't make for very good accounting but it certainly makes the job so much more fun. And as we are surrounded with friends and acquaintances who have all to many many contractor horror stories to tell, we count ourselves very, very lucky.

So it wasn't at all surprising to see how much the guys shared my enthusiasm for the new doors. That Thursday afternoon when I came home and saw the first door installed they were as excited as I was. And I was excited. My voice went up two octaves, I was jumping up and down, I was flushed, and I must have called Manu about six times. The doors looked incredible. They changed the whole space. They changed the whole house! By this time the guys were jumping up and down too with PF pointing out all the marvels of the state of the art hardware and the solid construction. They lock! They open! They swivel! You'd think we'd won the lotto.

Having decided that they'd had enough excitement for one day, and with the winter daylight hours being as limited as they are, PF and Louis cut out early, leaving me alone to contemplate the wondrous new additions. Because they were just that special, I popped open a bottle of wine and poured myself a glass. And there among the sawdust, the power tools, the sheets of gyp rock and the mess I sat in the thrift store chair and I felt like a queen. 

And then I couldn't stand it any longer, I called Manu. Just one more time.

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All systems go!

The mighty backhoe

The completed framing for the future patio doors

The ever essential coat closet.

PF on his coffee break. Coffee by Manu.

The Tall House is a veritable hive of activity today. Plumbers plumbing, Electricians de-wiring, PF and Louis erecting walls, not to mention a big honking backhoe tearing up the place.

The backhoe was brought in to dig up the front yard so that we could replace the old lead pipes that stem from the city ducts to our house. But as an added bonus the ugly-beyond-mention brick-a-brack flower container is no more. Money well spent.

Most of the framing has been completed. PF and Louis are magicians and take extreme pride in their work. Because of them we will have beautiful, straight walls (quite a feat seeing as the Tall House is anything but square) not to mention a lovely straight ceiling. For a while we had considered trying to do the framing ourselves but once we were confronted with the geometrical headache that the crooked, stripped walls represented we knew that we were out of our depth. So PF and Louis have been working their magic since Monday, easily accomplishing in 5 days what would surely have taken us a very painful 3 weeks.

Manu also spent two half days (and a few nights) working alongside them doing the grunt work: insulating some walls, lining others with black paper, cleaning up, even getting coffee. And although the work is hard, I can tell that Manu is having the time of his life, taking great pride in his unofficial apprenticeship with two masters of their trade.

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Zio Peter

Manu, being Italian has all manner of relatives and near relatives in and around the construction business. His Zio Gino is a house painter, Gino's longtime partner is a master plasterer, there are distant in-laws who manufacture windows, and most importantly there is his Zio Peter, who is a plumber. If we're to have any hope at all of finishing the first floor near our targeted budget, we absolutely need dear Peter to give us a hand. The thing is Peter is now retired and while he often takes on small contracts, he does so begrudgingly and only if they are to be executed within a stones throw of his bungalow. There lies the rub. For the Tall House is a good twenty minutes drive from Zio Peter's and certainly way, way out of his comfort zone. For Peter lives in The Paese, the Italian part of town where stone lions greet you at the entrances of white bricked triplexes and where salciccia are still lovingly made in the cantina and where il vino (or some semblance there of) is still brewed in il garage. Interestingly, Peter was able to leave, at the tender age of 12, his tiny native Calabrian village and set forth alone to a better life, an ocean away, in the New World. But he is now loath to set foot but a single block outside of his neighbourhood. 

Peter is a whiz with his hands but tends to shoot off at the mouth far too often and because of this is the subject of some ridicule from The Famiglia. But despite this or perhaps because of it, he is dearly loved and forever the subject of family chatter.

Now, being Italian is governed by rules of behaviour that even after eleven years of communal living (and six years of marriage) escape me. Great and everlasting offence has been taken because an aunt did not suitably appreciate a particular dish of pasta. And people have been written out of wills for not saying goodbye with the proper etiquette. But the most cardinal of rules remains: "thou shalt always help any family member in need". The fact that Peter has chosen to ignore this rule has caused a modicum of tension between Peter and his sister, my mother in law. But Peter is staying put and no amount of begging or cajoling will change his mind.

Zio Peter though, has sorely underestimated the brilliance that is Manu. Like a hunter methodically setting a trap for his prey, Manu has patiently been laying the groundwork for poor Peter to have no choice but install the first floor plumbing in The Tall House. For Peter's downfall is simple: its not the love of money (god knows we've offered!) but the art of the DEAL. Ever since I've known him Peter has been selling used bicycles, tires, scrap metal or plumbing parts all for his sole enjoyment rather than for the additional income. And so one day when Manu had managed to lure his uncle to the Tall House, Peter noticed we had a whole bathroom suite to sell that was barely 10 years old(!). Well, kryptonite comes in various shapes and sizes and in Peter's case it has taken on the appearance of a Kohler toilet. For Peter is in the process of brokering a deal to sell the whole set. Manu, playing dumb, has told him that he wants Peter to take care of the transaction. Peter will then pocket the money which Manu will of course refuse to take and then Badabing! Under the sacred code of Italian ethics Peter will owe Manu, Big Time. And voila, without knowing what hit him, Peter is now our plumber. 

Grazie carissimo Pietro.

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Hurry up and wait

Although the first phase of renovations was little more than two years ago, we had already forgotten the amount of down time there is in the remodelling process.

Even before allotting a job, the various trades have to be briefed (which depending on the size of the job can take up to an hour and a half) then it generally takes at least a week for them to arrive at a quote, then in all likely hood they have other jobs lined up... Apparently patience is a learned virtue. Well, we must be in the midst of the master class.

At the moment we are waiting on quotes from two electricians and three door manufacturers. The electric work in The Tall House is creative to say the least so we expect this to eat up a sizeable amount of our budget. So too will the two sets of french doors leading to the backyard which no matter how many concessions are made still apparently have to be custom built.

The event that thrills us the most is the impending installation of a mammoth 35 foot structural beam that will enable us to completely open up the first floor. Being no body's fools we are well aware that this job is way out of our league so we have brought out the big guns and hired no other than Pierre our contractor from  the previous stage of renovations. Pierre is extremely talented and we trust him blindly but he is expensive. So while it would be so much simpler to hand over the whole job to him, we can't afford it. So for now we have struck up a deal where upon he acts as a consultant for an hourly wage and when the task is just to tricky we hire him and his men for specific tasks.

The steel beam has to hold up the top two stories of the house, so it will be a MOTHER. At 35 feet long and 14 inches thick, it will weigh over a hundred pounds per linear foot and take a week to install. And of course there are other various mini beams that have to be added under floors, over stair cases as well as a few steel columns in the basement. A tornado could touch down on the Tall House and it wouldn't move. Pierre and his gang will start on Monday, August 3rd at 7am sharp. It promises to be quite a show.

So while we have been waiting for this (yet again) mystical date, Manu has been spending most Friday afternoons and Saturday mornings continuing the demo work. For it seems that one can never open up enough. The basement ceiling had to be taken down in order to make the rewiring simpler, the non structural walls on the first floor had to be cleared out and most exciting of all, the wall separating the upper floors from the lower ones has to be removed. Manu has been wonderful about it, never once complaining about missing out on time at the park with the kids, or about having to do the work alone. He also looks really cute in his handyman outfit.

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