The saga of the giant pit continues, if it were on Netflix we would be signed up for multiple seasons. So after a fall season of filling the pit (who needs a gym membership!!!) with winter closing in and snow on the ground it was time for another burn ….
With less snowfall than previous years it took a bit of extra effort to get the truck stuck in the snow (Editor, I’m always willing to make the extra effort). This necessitated us abandoning it near the top of the driveway and trekking home…..( and missing pickleball….😮 !!!)
…..to be pulled out the next morning by our very kind neighbour, Andrew, with his tractor that is much bigger than ours ( and it has a heated cab….which ours does not..!!)
We tore out the wood burning, smoke churning fireplace……
…….and replaced it with a very pretty and much more efficient propane stove on its own thermostat.
…..and Scott set to his creative task of using the lovely grain washed lumber from the unholy pile at the bottom of the garden…..to build a little masterpiece behind it.
It turned out that our horrific smoke issue was an incorrectly installed chimney….but you could not tell that without pulling the whole thing apart. It was still satisfying to find this out…especially since we also discovered absolutely no insulation in the walls in that section of the house ( which is a real problem at -46 Celsius). Another good thing to have solved, especially since the next drama was the boiler failing (house is heated with in-floor heating) …in December……!!! Big drama as the CO monitor screaming was our first indication of the problem.
The short version of that story being that the new propane stove served us well (kept us from freezing in December) and two weeks later we had a nice new modern boiler installed and operational.
Ever Mr Reno…Scott also spent the winter tearing apart our master bedroom with a bit of whacky design in every corner……well nobody would expect it to just look ‘regular’
I am given to understand that the attic part of the insulation job was most enjoyable…(….NOT…!!!…LOL)…it certainly was not mood enhancing….!!!!
Remember the burn pit?…..well it has its own story this year….the short version being that the crew who demolished the old High School in the town of Milk River rented our burn pit to dispose of the lumber from that demo job. It saved them time, diesel and manpower NOT having to truck it to Lethbridge. They were superb to deal with….and at the end of it all….filled our original pit in, beautifully graded the land around it, and dug us a nice new pit over by the next section of the woodpile.
Google earth very conveniently posted an updated satellite image this year…..so the first image is from 2021…before us. The second image is the new one, with the woodpile circled in red….and the burn pit in blue.(the green line is our property boundary.)
Ironically….less than two weeks after the image was posted…that old pit was filled in and graded and we now have a new (but similarly gigantic..!!) pit to the left of the blue ring…!!!
With all that done…now all we need to do is pack up and get on the road….so lets get to it……😁
OsteoPraxis on the road 