It’s only been a couple of weeks since my last post, but it feels like an age. Why is it that when you’re say relaxing on the beach, or pottering around the garden, time slips past as quickly as a German in a sports car.
But when, just for example, you’re stressing about concrete floors, delivery of windows, construction loans, build costs and whether your children have finally and irretrievably broken your wife, it goes about as fast as a chain-smoking asthmatic doing the 100m dash in flip-flops. If anything, time seems to deliberately slow down so you can savour the low points all the better.
It really isn’t fair and is the fourth thing I’m going to be having words about with The Authorities when I finally shuffle off this mortal coil. For those of you interested, my first three items to discuss being:
- Belgium, really?
- Why are cows so difficult to draw?
- Speeding up Karmic retribution
In particular, I could do with #3 being reviewed asap. It would be pleasing to know that our window salesman had contracted, just off the top of my head, a nasty case of genital herpes for being such an arse and messing up our window installation schedule. Or that the utterly incompetent buffoons (I love that word) at HSBC suddenly and inexplicably lost the ability to count beyond 27. Although, on reflection, that actually might already be true.
Fortunately, we’ve been lucky enough to discover some stars in the last couple of weeks. In particular, a big shout to James, the Concrete Guy. I must admit that my first impression of him wasn’t favourable. He was making demands on Dave and myself at the eleventh hour for a gravel ramp for the concrete truck so that his team didn’t have to push wheelbarrows up a wooden one. Aww, bless. I mean, it’s not that I’m unsympathetic. I’ve shifted tons of concrete, tamped it down while my arms burned against the clock (and lost), troweled it and carted it. It’s a hard job for fit guys. But then I never got paid $4,500 to lay a slab. So my general feeling was one of “suck it up princess and stop blubbering”.
But Dave The Man is a compassionate GC. He called in a favour with Big George, one of our farming neighbours he’s friends with. Big George used George The Tractor and built the ramp. I’d have loved to get a photo of “George On George” because let’s face it, there are loads of amusing images to conjure up there. Unfortunately, I didn’t and so I’ll have to leave it to your imagination.
But in the end, James The Concrete Guy did an excellent job. The floor is smooth and ready for our stains / polishing in a few weeks. In fact, most things have been better this week, so perhaps like Earl, karma is rewarding me for not losing the plot with them all. The windows are getting fitted over the weekend, our new bank (TD Canada) released the construction loan, Dave’s ahead of schedule with the steel siding and I even got my dome garage erected with a huge amount of help from a new friend, Shaun.
Now the weather is turning, we’re a definite step closer to being weather-tight and the August Crunch is almost done. After this weekend there shouldn’t be any big surprises (although there will certainly be lots of little ones). There’s still stucco work on the exterior and a whole pile of jobs to do inside, but we’ll have electricity hooked up soon and running water will follow a day or two after. That’ll do nicely.
4 thoughts on “Karma And Concrete Floors”
Where did you get the top photo of me? Or is it the second one?
lol, from a hidden stash Dad
I absolutely adore reading your blog posts, the variety of writing is smashing. This blog as usual was educational, I have had to bookmark your site and subscribe to your feed. Your theme looks lovely.Concrete Floors
Thanks Chris. Our floors were done by James at the A-Team concrete floors in Ottawa and polished up by Jean Marc at Custom Concrete Floors (pretty much the only show in Ottawa). Our arsehole of an electrical contractor stained them with fruit juice before we'd even moved in (still working that out in the final bill), but even so they're beautiful. Looks like you do some really nice work too. Thanks for reading the blog. The next one is back on the subject of Chickens and Chiropractery.