Author: Melissa Gullickson

I thought you might be interested in how we are currently spending our days during this phase of our build.

Mornings start fairly early, with the dogs wanting their breakfast by 6 am. Then we usually end up back in bed for a bit, just to stay warm, usually we have our phones or ipad nearby to check on the goings on in the world.

Our dog Maggie is usually the last one out of bed (the life of a dog!)

Our breakfasts can range from  yogurt and cereal to eggs with all the trimmings.  The builders usually arrive anywhere between 5 and 6, so we usually can watch them busy at work while we eat.

Often we touch-base with the builder early in the day to go over anything he or we have questions about and discuss the schedule and any concerns or issues.

Once we are fed and dressed for the day we often head over to our other property where we have our fruit trees and garden.  We do watering, weeding, mowing, etc., keeping things in shape.

Lunch is usually a pretty simple event and we have a little shady spot we like to head to, to eat. By lunch time the temperature is usually getting up there (especially with the 40 degree days we are currently having), so we focus on staying cool.

Afternoons can involve a lot of things; do dishes or laundry, drive into town (Castlegar or Nelson) to get supplies, hide out in the trailer with the air conditioner on, do some work outside or help with the build, head to the beach and cool off in the river, etc.

We usually wait until the temps start to drop before we start supper, so we’ve been having late suppers the last while. We’ve been able to enjoy a lot of our home grown produce which has been fantastic. Last night we had beets, salad with strawberries all from our garden, delicious!

After that, we might; do dishes, work on our computers, play games, prep for the next day, or just chill out. It is usually dark by 9 so we are usually inside by then. We do have satellite TV, so we usually watch a small bit of TV before we go to sleep.

So this is life now, but once the house is framed, things will change drastically as we start the hands on portion of the build.

Aron eye update:  You are probably wonder how Aron is doing with his eye injury.  A couple weeks ago, at a visit to his Dr. in Kelowna we found out the eye was leaking a bit, so Aron had to wear a pressure patch for a few days. Luckly at the next Dr. visit, the leaking had stopped. As previously mentioned, the eye is so full of blood that no further assessment can be done until is clears out more. This is still the case, but the Dr. did indicate there were a few positives, one being that Aron can see light through his eye and the other that the blood in the eye is not right up against the cornea.  So we are still optimistic, he will have a full recovery to the eye.

Recently he has been suffering from a lot of headaches, some so severe that he would be in bed for the day, not able to eat or do anything.  We’ve had infection ruled out by a local Optomestrist, so we can only assume it is assoiciated with the injury or eye recovery process. We’ve been working on finding treatments for him to deal with the headaches, and we’ve found a few things that seem to work fairly well and let him stay relatively pain free and active.

We are heading to Kelowna again on Tuesday to see Dr. Yap. We are both hoping maybe this time the blood might be reduced enough for him to see in the eye and give a more thorough evaluation. I’ll let you know how things go.

 

This is quick update just to show we are still making progress.

We have a bunch of interior walls up and some more exterior walls. If you are wondeirng about the big openings on the new  exterior walls, they are for double sliding doors in the Master Bedroom and Dining Room.

It’s great being on site for the build, as we can go over any time and walk through the work that has been done.  No matter how good your builder is, you always  need to double check things. We already found where they had missed framing in the door for our utility room and for our front entrance closets. Easy fixes now, but more work later on if they weren’t caught.

Today is supposed to be 40 degrees, so the hottest day yet. Too hot for me, but thank goodness for air conditioning!!!

Stay cool my friends!

Well it’s been a while since I’ve done a new post, so I apologize. First we’ve had issues with our internet speed and uploading pictures wasn’t going so well, but I think that is resolved now. Also we had some of our kids come by and visit over the last week, so we’ve been busy hanging out with them.

First, here is what’s been going on with the build:

1. The garage (aka ‘Man Cave’) is mostly done as far as framing goes. The floor is prepped and ready for concrete, which should be happening in the next few days or so. Then we will work on getting the doors on.                                                                         
2. The fill, piled up around both the garage and the house, has been smoothed out and the yard looks great now, just need grass.                                                         
3.  In the house, the floor joists were installed, then the sub floor and finally  walls started going up.  
4. Even got our son Jesse and daughter’s boyfriend Mitch to help lift up one of the long walls so it could be nailed in.
5. In addition we have had a lot of work done to improve our road. We now have a really nice road coming down to our place, that we will appreciate for many years to come.

As for the family visits, we had our son Jesse and his girlfriend Pei-Chi arrive early last Thursday. Jesse is moving back to Calgary from his job in San Francisco, so they stopped for a couple days on their way back to Calgary. We were so glad they planned with us into their trip.

Later on Thursday our daughter Alexa came with her boyfriend Mitch. They just moved into a new apartment the day before they left, so we really appreciated them coming out when they did for a great visit.

On Saturday our son Aaron came, and just left today. We were sad his wife Sonya and our little granddaughter JJ couldn’t make it, but it was great seeing him and getting his help with some work that needed to get done. He beat me so many times in Kings Cribbage that I’m not sure I can ever play that game again with him.

We had lots of fun together, hanging out at the beach, floating down the river, stand up paddle boarding, archery and shooting,  playing bean bag toss and lots of card and board games. We were so happy to see them all and it was a great time! We miss our family and friends back in Calgary, so visits are greatly appreciated.

UPDATE: Aron just gave me a couple videos (double speed) of them lifting up the garage roof trusses.

 

So at the end of the day yesterday this is what the garage was looking like:

And at the end of today, it’s looking great, almost there!

Should be able to pour the floor next week and then add some doors and we have somewhere we can start storing our stuff (all in paid storage units now $$$).

So today was our trip back to Kelowna to see  Dr. Yap, the Dr. that did Aron’s eye surgery. Upon checking his eye, Dr. Yap said that the eyeball was leaking a bit so he had to apply a pressure patch that Aron has to wear for a few days in  hopes that this will help keep things together so they can mend enough to stop the small leak. Still too much blood for any further assessments on damage. He did say it was promising that Aron can see light through that eye and that the blood in the eye doesn’t go right up to the cornea. So that provides us some hope for a full recovery. Now we have to go back next Tuesday for another checkup. Sure is a long day, driving to Kelowna and back. Looking forward to getting an Ophthamologist closer to home for future follow up checkups.

Sorry things have been a bit quiet on the blog front. With Aron’s injury, the extremely hot weather and other factors, things have been moving a bit slow, so not too much to share with you. But yesterday and today, the garage has had some significant progress. Here are is a photo from yesterday evening.

And now a video from mid-day today, you can definitely see that things are moving along.

The trusses were delivered later on today, so tomorrow things will really be starting to take shape. More pictures to come.

At our garden, we did dig up another potato plant. Last time we dug up a Yukon Gold, this time it was a Carolina (red potato). As you can see from the photo, they are already very big. We are wondering, how big will they be by fall time??

Also took a few more shots of the garden in general, everything is growing like crazy. Look how big the cherry tomato plant is next to Aron. Crazy!

Should be getting some corn before to long (Yahoo!)

As for Aron, he is improving somewhat. He still has some pain in his face and head, but it is getting less. He’s starting to sleep a bit better at night and feeling less tired during the day. The eye doesn’t look great, but that’s to be expected. He can’t see out of it, and when he looks at bright light he still just sees red. We are heading to Kelowna on Friday for a follow-up with the Opthamologist that did his eye surgery.  I’ll let you know how things go. We are still optimistic that he will get his sight back in time.

Although we had some great progress on the garage today, got some fill around the house foundation and finished our second gate for the fruit tree enclosure…

things turned a lot worse.

Aron had a bad accident with a bungee cord. He was removing it from some pipes we had in the back of the truck. The cord was tightly wound around them, and when he released the pressure on the cord, the end whipped back and hit him right in the glasses, breaking the left lens and then hitting his eye. There was lots of blood, but Aron remained totally calm. I drove him to the local Emergency (not a hospital) where they examined him and said there was a laceration and lots of blood at the back of the eye. They contacted a specialist and within an hour he was being flown to Kelowna to see the specialist.

Last night he had surgery to repair his ‘ruptured left globe’. The operation was a success, but because of all the blood, they still are not clear the extent of any other damage he might have sustained. I’m driving to Kelowna now to pick him up and go see the Dr. for a follow up exam. We may know more today.

One thing we learned is that we are going to have to be extra cautious and safe during the rest of this build. This was a wake up call that something can go wrong in a split second, and even a small accident can have huge impacts on our lives.

I’m so grateful that Aron is doing well and I’m hoping, that in the end, his eye will fully recover and this will be nothing more than a bad memory. This build is nothing if we don’t have each other to share it with.

Be safe everyone!

With these hot, hot temperatures, we figured it was high time to head down to the beach to cool off.

The last couple springs the Slocan river has been unusally high because of the higher than normal snow pack and quick spring melt offs. So what we have seen is that our beach is getting big deposits of sand when the river is so high. This year, was the most extreme, as you will see in the photos.  The first picture is our steps leading down to the beach, doesn’t look abnormal at all.

The next picture is after Aron has dug down to reveal all the stairs we usually see, but were covered by new sand deposits this spring. (Ignore the tipped over wagon at the top of the stairs, that to stop our old senile dog from wandering off)

So our beach is much higher than normal this year and as the water drops the sand is in tiers, we took a rake and have started raking it smoother. There is still lots left to do, but its starting to look better already.

Before
After

Now we can relax, cool off in the river, and enjoy the beach!

The Slocan River is a real attraction in July and August for people to go floating/tubing down. We see lots of people go by in the afternoons on the weekends. This was the biggest group (all tied together) we had ever seen before.

Gotta go eat my lunch so I can head down to the beach again. Going to be 35 today, so need somewhere to cool off.

As for the building, well let’s say the week has started off slow. We had one worker on site doing a bit of lumber cutting, but we hoped things we be back  on track again all this week. Hoping tomorrow we see more action!

Seems like we are still in a bit of a holding pattern with our build. The inspector came and said the drain rock had to be 6″ deep and ours wasn’t consistently that deep all around the house. He said just take some photos once we had this done and send them, he wouldn’t need another site visit. So of course this was done the next morning and the photos sent, but the inspector was on holidays the following day and even though we cc’d the person covering for him, we never heard back yet. We are looking forward to getting this approved so we can fill in around the house and get rid of our big fill piles.

Yesterday we had our house floor joists delivered. So an actual house should start taking shape soon. Monday the garage truss package should arrive and they will start construction of the garage. We are hoping to get it completed relatively quickly so we can move stuff out of storage and into the garage.

The most exciting thing to happen today was we actually took produce  home out of our garden. We decided to dig up one potato plant and see what how things were coming. Because the top of the plants were so large, we weren’t sure what was happening underground. My expectations was a bunch of small potatoes, that we could eat for supper.  Well, we were both surprised with the size, the biggest one was bigger than my fist. Looks like we will have a good potato harvest this year!

We also picked a little bit of spinach, a couple cherry tomatoes (they were delicious) and some blueberries. So enjoyable to be eating from the garden already.

In the last week or so we have also been picking Saskatoon berries a few times. There are so many that grow wild all around us. We’ve picked and frozen a bunch for pies, but we’ve been eating them fresh, putting them in pancakes and having them on icecream. It has been a real treat. I made a pie yesterday and it was fantastic. So much fun to go for a walk with the dogs and pick and eat berries all along the path.

The forecast for the next week is crazy hot. So we are heading down to our beach this afternoon to do some cleanup and take a swim, first of the summer. Will post some pics and info tomorrow on that adventure.

I don’t know if you’d call how we are living glamping, but it is probably a close description. We have a lot of the conveniences of our city home, but are still missing a few.  For example, we have a washing machine here (bought a used top load) but we don’t have a dryer, so we use a clothes line. Having never relied soley on a clothes line before, I didn’t think much of it. It is a bit of work though to hang up the clothes from each load, keep checking when they are dry, etc. Timing is important, as I learned, you can wash a lot faster than the clothes will dry and you get backed up for clothes line space.

Then there is doing dishes by hand. I never minded when we stayed here for a week or two, doing dishes daily by hand, but it is getting pretty old fast. Seems like the dirty dish pile grows very quickly and we usually keep putting off washing until we run out of room to deal with them. That doesn’t take long, usually have to do them once a day.

Cooking can also be challenging. There is very little to no counter space inside our trailer, but we do have some tables set up outsitde. So often I’m running from inside to outside to get a meal ready. Using the inside burner sometimes and/or the BBQ burner outside, etc.  In past visits our meals were quick and easy, just BBQ something and have a salad or something easy. Now we are living here, we need to eat more normally. So we are buying way more groceries and cooking more regular meals, so naturally this means more prep and more dishes, sigh…

But I do enjoy a delicious meal in a beautiful setting!

With the building side of things slowing down a bit the last while (waiting on an inspection). We have been spending time over at our garden. Here is what we’ve been up to:

We put mulch all around our strawberries. I read that slugs don’t like to crawl over wood mulch, so hoping this will be a deterrent for any in the area.

We put up some of our deer netting for the peas to start climbing on. It looks like it will work great, keeping fingers crossed.

We built our compost bin, and started filling it up!

We finally built a proper gate for the garden enclosure. Still have a couple small things left to complete it, but it is mostly done. Now we know our design works, we will build one for the fruit tree enclosure.  We have the gates opening a weird direction, but when both are open they will create an opening between the garden and the fruit enclosure. This way we can work in both and travel between easily and still keep the dogs contained.

It is pretty hot in the garden/fruit area and the dogs don’t particularly like it in there because of that. So I’m planning to build them a little dog palace, where they can lay on pillows and they will be shaded from the hot sun. I’ll also build a look-out from the top, as Maggie like to get a good view of everything around her. I’ll keep you posted on my progress.

Other than that we are just trying to keep cool in the afternoons. The forecast is for 33-36 everyday for the next week. We read that accuweather is even predicting this hot weather will last for 5 weeks. I hope they are wrong. We went down to the beach yesterday and it needs a bit of work and cleanup, I think we will have to spend some time down there really soon!

 

Good morning!  Aron has been out taking videos and photos with his drone. We thought we should share them with you as it gives another perspective on our build and property.  Enjoy!