New year, new blog entry! 2022 looks to be another year, that’s all I can predict. Hopefully, it will be amazing and as productive as 2021 has been. Looking back we got a lot accomplished. Not a lot has happened in the way of travel except jaunts to Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Boston, NYC, Westchester, and north Pennsylvania. Indeed, those trips did provide fun visits with family and friends. Unfortunately we did cancel major international trips throughout the year. In fact, Greg is home recuperating from Covid (tested positive, I assume Omicron) as I write. Luckily his symptoms are like a bad cold and he has gotten much better after only a few days, but again we have postponed our well planned trip to South America and Patagonia because of it. Will 2023 be the year?
Did I mention our involvement in helping Greg’s nephew remodel his house in 2021? I guess I left this project off the blog posts for 2021. Here’s a cute story: Greg’s brother Bob’s son bought a 2 bedroom ranch house near Syracuse. A few days after closing we went to visit and offer advice. Within an hour we were pulling down the ceiling. A year later, with mostly Bob at the yoke, the house is completely remodeled. We spent several weekends last winter/spring and various trips throughout the rest of the year helping: ripping up floors, pulling down walls, putting up walls, sanding, insulating, running electric and plumbing, painting, and of course, Greg building kitchen cabinets. It looks wonderful and what a great family project for Covid times.
And then, of course, we started building Dan and Anna’s house in PA in August. Here’s an update on the progress since my last blog in October:
With the house dried in, interior work commenced while the siding and trim were contracted out to the same outfit that did the roof shingling, Bonilla Bros. We spent another couple weeks in mid November and then again in early December working on plumbing, electric, and stair-building. Greg got most of the plumbing drains and vent work done and then over the course of 2 weekends he built 3 sets of stairs from the basement up to the attic. How exciting to not have to use ladders or worry about falls!
Stair-building takes a lot of thought and math so Dan, Anna, and I spent our work time doing other jobs while Greg pondered: additional interior work (blocking, nailers, etc.), building knee-walls or the like, prepping for electric wiring (installing outlet boxes, drilling holes for wiring, etc.), and stayed out of his way yet assisting him as necessary. Those stairs are beautiful! With the stairs roughed in Greg started working on the wiring and the panel boxes were installed because THE ELECTRIC COMPANY CAME BACK AND WE NOW HAVE ELECTRICITY!!! It wasn’t that easy though. The excavator had to dig a trench in 2 sections: house to transformer pad, transformer pad to telephone pole at the road for the electric cable. This was done with about 3 weeks spacing so for all that time a 6 foot trench paralleled the driveway with not many inches to spare for driving. In fact, the siding contractor did put his trailer in the ditch on the other side but with ingenuity and many hands and the tractor we were able to extract it. And of course we had to use the generator until it was all hooked up. BUT NOW IT IS and I think you can sense my happiness. As everyone on the job site can. NO MORE GENERATOR NOISE or buying gas! In addition, there is conduit installed underground for eventual Fios hookup. In fact, we installed over 300 feet of conduit ourselves with wire and twine threaded inside for eventual lighting and cable. How did you thread wire/twine through 300 feet of conduit, you might ask? Well, with old fashioned ingenuity and gravity to assist: the coiled corrugated pipe was dropped out the attic window and clothesline was tied to a wrench which was dropped into the conduit. With a little shaking the wrench made it’s way through to the bottom, 3 sections at a time. This should save some effort installing future wiring and/or cable without opening up the trench. We hope…
Bonilla Bros. started work on the Hardie-board fibreglass/cement siding with PVC trimwork. This combination should make for a relatively maintenance-free exterior. Of course, the contractor was unfamiliar with the exterior insulation/strapping work that we had done but with Greg’s assistance and some advice from the Hardie company reps it was all figured out. They did an amazing, meticulous job of flashing and trimwork and the house is slowly looking finished on the exterior (save for a few areas where there is some future work to be done, e.g. continuation of the porch roof and decks). Tomas and company at Bonilla were eager to please and consulted Greg a lot which is alternately reassuring and yet bothersome but in the end will make for a job well done for years to come.
Also during this time the geothermal heating system was installed. Both Anna and Dan were thinking of the future environmentally and financially and thus contracted with a geothermal installer. Geothermal heating/cooling involves taking heat/cold from the earth and transfers it to the house. Four wells were drilled to create a loop from which the circulated water will serve to provide a constant temperature source to heat/cool the house with transfer units sending the heated/cooled air throughout each room; the water is looped back to the ground to release the unwanted temp and regain the desired temp, depending on the season. Basically, evaporation and condensation are reversed as the seasons change. Don’t ask me for more info. There’s talk of refrigerant and molecular expansion and transfer of heat, ala your current air conditioning system. It’s a heavy up front investment with long term returns.
In writing this update I compressed a lot of work into a few paragraphs. There’s a reason I usually write this blog immediately afterwards as I tend to forget a lot of what happened. That being said, the last few months have been a whirlwind with building and driving and visiting. We celebrated my Mom’s 89th birthday and Thanksgiving and Christmas with family in-between work visits. We also stayed a few days in Philadelphia at our friend Christopher’s apartment with a spectacular city view. In addition, our friends Bob and Bonnie B. visited to check out our going’s on; Bob B. stayed with Greg to work one day while Bonnie and I took in the sights of Doylestown visiting the Mercer Museum and Fonthill Castle. We also had many, many good meals these last two months, partially undoing the weight I lost this summer while sweating.
At the end of December Greg headed down to PA to do more electric and plumbing since the spray foam insulation was scheduled for the beginning of Jan. 2022. Christina joined me as I headed home. While in PA Greg got Covid, likely from Dan who got it from a student at work. Both Greg and Dan (both boostered), though sick with cold symptoms, were functional and able to work on the house to prep for the insulation. Luckily Dan was already housesitting for a friend so they were able to isolate and work and live together while Anna remained unscathed and stayed back home with her parents. I celebrated New Year’s Eve without Greg at home but with some very good neighbors and friends. Thus ended 2021. Greg is home now, very much improved but we are quarantining just to be sure. We await what 2022 has to offer. May it be happy and healthy for all of us.
My new reality 