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Click to enlarge. |
And we settled into ours - the in-law's trailer, which we got special permission from the City to park on the property while we renovated. (One does feel somewhat bad referring to it as the original Crappy Little Trailer. The in-laws were quite generous in lending it to us, after all.) Thus, the very first item on the agenda - more important even than a new roof - was the addition of a toilet and a sink to the third floor attic, as the water-damaged floor in the one and only bathroom had already been ripped out for replacement. It was always a good idea to make one last trip up to the attic before bedding down in the trailer for the night - for obvious reasons.
Days were spent working at our salaried jobs to help fund the restoration; evenings and weekends were spent working on the house. Showers and laundry were done as needed at the respective parental houses. Life in the little trailer was cozy for the insomniac, the spouse and our offspring at that time ... an extremely large Russian Wolfhound named Asia. And when Asia came inside the trailer at nights, everybody stayed in pretty much the same position until morning.
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Probably the rainbow makes living in the trailer seem a lot more idyllic than it was ... |
After the relocation, a hole was dug for the new basement underneath the house and a heavy-duty foundation poured, with cutouts in the cement to accommodate each of the beams still running underneath the house.
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Pouring the concrete ... |
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Perched over the foundation, waiting for the cement to cure ... |
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Lowered onto the basement ... |
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Carefully extracting the beams ... all but one, which still runs down the centre of the basement. |
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Cutouts filled in with cement ... |
Our one regret during the restoration was that we were not able to afford to put the wooden cold pantry at the rear back on. Sadly, the quote to have that replicated would have eaten up far too much of our budget. It came down to a cold pantry or a new roof - the new roof won.
Having salvaged as many bricks as possible from the columns around the original veranda, these were now used to plug the hole at the rear where a chimney had been vented from the kitchen, and to brick up the back where the cold pantry had been. Ridding old bricks of their mortar so they can be reused is not as much fun as you might expect it to be.
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HE looks happy because HE just had to LAY the bricks. HE didn't have to CLEAN the bricks. |
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The roofer picked the hottest week of the year to install our new cedar roof. By the third day, he had heatstroke. |
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He wore a pair of Hush Puppies and carried a bundle of shingles on each shoulder up that ladder. It was frightening. |
Meanwhile, the insomniac made a trip to the Glenbow Museum Archives to try and locate original pictures of Riley Lodge so we knew how to rebuild the veranda. As we'd never seen an enclosed veranda, we assumed, as did many others, that the cedar shakes were a later addition and originally it likely had spindles and railings like most other verandas from the same time period in the area.
After having gone through three boxes of Riley family papers and discovering absolutely nothing, we ended up using a picture taken from a 1910 book of house plans as the model.
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That new roof made quite a difference ... looks better already. |
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New brick columns made from reclaimed brick, and restored original columns ... |
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The completed veranda ... |
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Ohhhh, look how young we were ... And Happy, Happy, Happy. |
Once the exterior work was done, we turned our attention to the interior. We redid the plumbing and heating, eliminated the old knob-and-tube wiring, insulated and finally drywalled. We wanted to do lath and plaster walls, but again, the cost was just too high.
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Insulating the attic ... good times. |
After the drywall, we rented a paint sprayer and added a coat of beige-tinted primer to all the walls. Having had no previous experience with industrial paint sprayers, a fair bit of the primer ended up elsewhere ...
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A foreshadowing of what the insomniac's hair might look like in the future (like right now), frosted with white ... |
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Can't blame any of that white in the spouse's beard on paint though ... |
The second the primer dried, we contacted the moving company to get our furniture out of storage; the move-in date firmly etched in our memories as it was the spouse's birthday - October 7, 1987. An ideal time of year to be moving out of a trailer and into a heated house.
The following pictures show how it looked back then, before all the picture rail, plate rail, baseboards, door and window trim that had been labelled and removed at the old site had been stripped of their many layers of paint and reinstalled. It's awfully ... beige, isn't it?
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So beige ... and so uncluttered. Ugh. |
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Before the arrival of the blinds and lace curtains, and elimination of the salvaged lighting ... |
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This was our only kitchen cabinet for many, MANY years ... |
Tomorrow ... the final post. The Before and After photos.
IA
* In 2008, the insomniac returned to the Archives, and after wading through six or seven more boxes of Riley family material that had been donated since 1987, found four pictures of Riley Lodge in the very last envelope in the very last box; said discovery causing her to utter a muffled whoop of exultation and do a quick fist pump of her white-gloved hand (Archives are almost as quiet as Libraries). That year, we hired Mark W. Chambers Architect Ltd. to draw up new plans for the veranda, recreating exactly how it looked in the photos, and rebuilt it. Everything is now as it should be ...