Friday, July 14th
"Bonne fête" to our French cousins!
And we lost our frenchman, Cyrille went home on Monday to get back to his own projects. Between Senegal and France, the bees, building the barn and renovating the house, he should be quite busy in the coming months. We'll never thank him enough for his precious help, we wish him the best of luck and we hope he'll visit with us again someday. We promised to show him Quebec city, the whales and Gaspe. It'll be the perfect excuse for us to go back, we loved sea-kayaking with the belugas a few years ago.
Here, work advances at a snail's pace it seems. Did you ever notice how they hardly seem to move when you're looking at them; but when you look away, after a few minutes, they end up at the other end of the world? It's a bit like that with the house: there are so many things to do, including everyday life, that it looks like there's very little progress. But at the end of the day, we look at it and another small piece has appeared and at the end of the week, a whole new stage is completed.
First we visited with a young family that is building a straw bale house close by. They dropped by our place about 3 weeks ago and we wanted to see their place before Cyrille's departure. It's an impressive worksite, the house seems huge compared with ours. Like us, they're far from the road and run on solar energy only. It was particularly interesting to exchange with them since we're really in the same boat and at about the same stage in the building process, we could share all kinds of tricks to make things easier. On the way there, we took time to visit around St-Donat and found some nice houses. Cyrille added more pictures to his trip's collection: houses and cars. During his first outing in Montreal, the Friday of the Grand Prix, he'd taken a whole bunch of fancy car photos.
All that didn't stop us from doing the first coat of mud on the new wall as planned. Alain carved some logs and we sanded them before fixing them in place for the top part of the wall. It should be finished today or tomorrow. Sunday, we're expecting a few people and we should be able to stash the tires away, do another coat of mud, treat the outside of the log walls and maybe even start on the roof trusses. Yikes! I think I'm a bit ambitious here... anyway, that's the plan for the coming week. We'd also like to go on a scavenging hunt. A friend of the family that collects everything he finds that could still be useful, has invited us to visit his backyard. Since he's been doing it for years, it'll be more like a treasure hunt. For example, he says he has some large gauge electrical wires that we can certainly put to good use.
And I almost forgot to tell you about the fridge disaster. First, let me explain that what we use is more like a huge cooler that doesn't need electricity. It's an old freezer with an extra layer of insulation and it uses the same thermal mass principle as our house to maintain the proper temperature with the addition of some ice. In the winter it's easy, we only need to leave water jugs outside the door and in the summer we use a freezer at my brother's place. We'd read that an easy way of getting that mass was by using beer cans at the bottom of the old freezer since liquids are especially good at keeping cold. Obviously that idea came for the United States where beer is cheap and almost all water. We decided to go with soda cans, that was last August. Well, when I checked to see if too much condensation water was accumulating at the bottom of our "fridge", I found instead quite a mess to clean up. I spent half a day emptying and washing it all: a dozen cans had leaked their content. If those drinks can pierce holes into aluminium cans, I wonder what they do to your stomach? Anyway, we replaced all the cans with water jugs... and we're still pondering how to best optimize the system. In fact, we want to use 2 air pipes to bring the coolness from outdoors as soon as it gets below 4C outside. After that, all we'll need is a small circuit with 2 thermostats to open and close the traps as needed.