In the winter a water pipe broke under the porch that feeds the outside tap. I had drained the pipe and the tap was wide open but the pipe was slightly sagging and at its lowest point it froze, expanded and burst. Fixing it wasn’t a lot of work, but I had to crawl under the porch and it stinks of cat pee.

The pipe is fixed now, and A. can water the plants and I can use the hose to wash my car. Uhm no, I don’t wash the car, I haven’t done that since I bought it. I’m such a bad person.

Next year I’ll make sure to completely blow or suck all the water out of the pipe.

[Update]

A asked:

So, like, how did you know the pipe had burst?

And how did you fix the pipe?

I found out when I opened the valve and the water bursted out. Finding water leaks is usually not very hard. Leaking water makes a lot of noise. Gas leaks also make sound, but by the time they get loud it is usually too late.

I fixed the pipe by cutting out the piece of pipe shown above with a pipe cutter and by a putting new piece of pipe in it’s place connected with two lugs that I soldered.

The weather is still good (two weeks of sunny weather and it seems to stay nice the coming week as well! Maybe this summer won’t be that bad after all…) so I also redid the front balcony on the second floor. I hung the balustrade in mid-air, because there was no room for it in the garden (the porch balustrade was still there) and now the whole thing looks like a deconstructionism art installation. Passing contractors stop their trucks to gaze up.

After 5 balconies I’m getting quite good at this, but if a client would ask me to do it for her I’m not sure I would. It is dirty and stressful work and after applying the polyester I’ve so many little fibreglass pieces in my skin that it itches for a couple of days.

Our house currently resembles the ruins of an ancient Greek temple. I removed the columns that support the front balcony and now they are standing at odd angles in the garden, supported by buckets. Several people already stopped their car to see what had happened. Disaster tourism we call that in Dutch (but we weren’t featured in the “Journal de Montréal”… yet.)

I removed the balustrade around the porch so I can demolish it. The porch is all rotten and before the main beams have to be totally replaced I had to go in and do something about it. I will replace the porch with polyester and fibreglass so it can survive a few decades without maintenance, just as I did in the back. My plan was to do this in the early summer but the weather never agreed with me. But now it seems to stay sunny for a few days so I have to use this opportunity. Even though I don’t feel like it.

Today was my third day that I helped building a house. I volunteer for Habitat for Humanity, an international charity that builds houses and then sells them to poor people who normally can’t afford to buy a house. They get a very nice interest free mortgage, so instead of paying rent they slowly pay of their house, and this hopefully reverses the downward spiral of accumulating more and more debt.

The Montréal chapter of Habitat for Humanity just started so there is only one building location. Last year they’ve built one house and now another one is built next to it. It’s a small contribution but you have to start somewhere.

This weekend I assist making a form to pour concrete in, that will become the stairs into the basement. With all the rain of the past weeks that proved a challenge since the soil is saturated with water and not very stable. The house is built on one of the lower parts of the island of Montréal so there is no rock underneath the house but clay. Backbreaking hard digging, but fun to do things I’ve never done before. It might come in handy one day.

Working with volunteers is quite a challenge. Especially when they sometimes have no experience with construction or for that matter with physical labour in general. The general contractor who oversees everything is glad when there aren’t that many volunteers so he can make sure that there aren’t too many errors made, that have to be corrected later. Today there are too many people and a lot of “watching other people work” is taking place. Since I’m one of the people that work I don’t mind too much, but I can understand that spending your weekend not doing very much can be quite frustrating. I think Habitat needs to organize things a bit better, otherwise a lot of volunteers will not come back.

Not everything is done by volunteers: a lot of the harder things are done by paid professionals. Like the plumbing, framing, foundation, electricity, the roof and the windows and doors. That way the structural integrity of the house is secured.

(Now I have to clean the rest of the house; lots of sawdust there…)

Before we can start using the new bookcases our special test team has to test its integrity. We were slightly worried before they started the rigourous tests but that proved unnecessary: the bookcases passed with very high scores.

So now we have to unpack the boxes of books and put them into the bookcases. I think they’re nicer now in their virginal white state, but I don’t have a say.

After a lot of work (and some paid contracts in between for distraction) I can finally start painting the bookcases. But first the ceiling and walls of the living room need a coat of paint. You don’t want any splatters on the new bookcases.

When Alison moved in our appartment, the previous tenant had just painted it. “It still needs another coat, shall I do that?,” she asked. But Alison hated the drab brown colour so she replied her not to bother. It took her 13 years to find someone to do it for her, but today, at long last, the brown is gone. It’s a very light pink now, and it looks great.

Painting the bookcases, the shelves and the mouldings is more work than the ceiling and walls; it is going to be painted white and it will at least take 3 coats.

I hate painting. It’s stupid work but you still have to stay concentrated in order to prevent leaving streaks and blobs. And the water based paints dry so quickly that you really need to work fast and still be precise. Ah well, in a few days it will be all done. I can’t wait to see the results.

Pruning the maple so our tenants can use their washing lines. It’s a yearly ritual, but this time I used a tall ladder to be able to saw off a branch that was very high up. I attached the top of the ladder to the tree with a sling, so it wouldn’t slide off the tree and fall down. It was windy so the branches were moving and I got a little seasick.

This is of course part of the master plan to be a good landlord. I’m sure the tenants won’t even notice that the tree has been pruned. But who knows, maybe next year they won’t refuse the rent increase. There is some improvement on that front; this year only 2 out of 4 refused.

I finally started building built-in bookcases in our living room. It was long overdue but I was just too busy with other things to make something for ourselves.

Here’s an artist impression of how it will look like in a few weeks.

Apart from the bookcases there will be drawers for CDs and a big shelf for Alison to put plants on. After the bookcases, one in every corner, are finished, my books can finally leave the boxes that they inhabited for the past four and a half years. I don’t even remember which books I brought to Canada and which I left behind.

While temporarily putting Alison’s books and the books I collected over the past years into boxes I felt very sad. It somehow seemed I was moving out, instead of building something new. Fortunately that feeling didn’t last long, but I surely hope I didn’t suddenly became clairvoyant…

With the plywood in place and screwed down, I cover it with a fibreglass weave saturated with polyester resin. After it has cured I cut of the “skirt”, and caulk the edges with the wall.

And now, repeat this for the next balcony hoping the weather will stay nice and we won’t get a snowstorm.

[No snow, but it did rain…]