Wednesday, June 6, 2012

Deja-choo

There's been a lot going on over the last couple of weeks including the odd winter sniffle. Luckily most of the snottiness has passed me by, inflicting most of its damage on the male members of the household.

Which is just as well, as I've been far too busy to get sick - organising protest meetings about public broadcasting, making my thoughts heard on the UC Arts proposal (votes/results here), working my last shifts at the Quake Box and doing some fill-in production work a few days a week... you can see why my thesis proposal is still very much a work-in-progress.

The house has been moving on at pace.
 The foundations were laid on Monday May 21st, then the framing arrived on the Friday.
On Monday 28th, the walls started going up... this is where it starts to get really exciting, where the shapes we've made in our heads/on paper start to come to life.  The more housey it gets, the harder it is to wait out the remaining time until it's completed.

It's almost completely reversed in comparison to the layout of our previous house. In this new & improved version the living area is at the front and the bedrooms are towards the back - ours is furthest away from the road, and the entire house is set further back on the section. I am sooooo looking forward to not hearing the road noise of passing traffic as I try and get to sleep, or the (current) neighbour's truck when he starts it up, 6 days a week, at about 6.30am.
Even though there's been a bit of back & forth recently about the kitchen wiring and the laundry cupboard, and the process of dealing with the building firm & various sub-contractors has been quite time-consuming, progress has been steady.
In a way we were lucky that the September 2010 earthquake did more than enough damage to make the house a write-off, and that we'd already been processed & paid out by EQC before the February 22 quake the following year. Otherwise we'd be caught up in this whole apportionment mess.
We had even more reason to be pleased with progress recently... hubby got chatting to a guy whose house was also munted in the September quake. He's dealing with a different design & build company, and has yet to even sign off the plans. By yesterday (Tuesday June 5th), the scaffolding was going up in preparation for the roof.
Aaaaaahhhh sweet, sweet progress. Even time for an arty shot!

And then last night, it started to rain. The house we're currently renting started up its familiar wet weather symphony... the cascades of rainwater gushing through the many gaps in the guttering, the wind whistling through the chimney cracks, and the splish splash of passing traffic. The weather warnings had been in place for a couple of days but we were feeling quietly confident that the worst we'd see in C-city would be snow on top of the Port Hills.

How wrong we were.
At 6.45am, when the alarm went off, I could hear the rain still steadily falling.
At 7am, when I went to turn the coffee machine on, the rain had become a little sleety.
By the time hubby went to work at about 7.45am, it was looking more & more like snow.
At 8am, my project manager rang to cancel our site meeting. 'Won't be much happening on any building site today' he reckoned.

At 8.35am, our son's school texted to say that school was closed. By this time, the boy was already at the bus exchange, so he just had to turn round and bus back home again.
First thing he said when he walked in the door was 'I thought you said it would be too warm and wet for snow'.
Heh. Whoops.
I made him a hot chocolate. Good thing I'm better at that than predicting the weather.
 cotton wool snow on the fence
snowy carpet, inside and out

So here we go again. A massive snowfall for the city, and we're only 6 days into winter! Most of us thought that last year's double snowfall was more than enough for a decade or so. Icing on the quake 3-peat... Deja-choo for us all.

Next step: the roof. Please, no more snow?!

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