Have I mentioned we have awesome neighbours? Dave, pictured here, and Mary are awesome. They not only have kept an eye on our place and alerted me when things go awry, but Dave has also been busy helping Allan, aka Malkovitch, with the exterior and now he's building decking with the heat-treated wood for our exterior carbonized wood experiment!  Here he is the the 20-some panels of rough sawn 2x4s on a 1x6 sleepers he's made so far. With the exception of a few panels, we are going to leave them untreated on the roof deck. Robert from AITF and I are going to monitor and record how the colour changes over the course of a year. And hopefully, they will be durable as decking for a long, long time! 

Photos courtesy of Mary G.

The first of the carbonized wood decking!

Here are the first four pieces that our neighbour David made for our roof deck.  David is planing down rough-hewn 1x6 and 2x4 lumber to create 3'x3' squares.  It looks awesome! The colour is a nice medium brown too- we'll see how it weathers, stains, and fades. We are working with Alberta Innovates Technology Futures to test the durability of the heat-treated wood and hopefully make the case for a market for this material in Alberta!

Off to a posi+ive start!

I was ecstatic when I opened up our electrical bill for the period of Aug. 21 to Sept. 21! We were a net generator of electricity!  We used 263 kWh living in the basement- and with our trades using electricity to run their various saws, compressors, etc.
We generated 550 kWh, according to the utility bill. And our cost after all the rate riders, delivery charges, etc. was $3.26. I'm hoping the utility will PAY/credit US sometime!

Look Ma! The water boils in less than a minute!

Also in exciting news, we are having fun cooking our meals on an induction range. It was astounding how quickly water comes to a boil! Serena made pasta with a delicious bison meatballs, cherry tomato and garlic sauce. Yum!

Our first weekend upstairs!

Yay! We made it upstairs last Saturday- moving from the basement suite to our house proper! We cleaned it just enough to get our beds installed and for the kitchen and bathroom to be workable. Now, we start the slow and steady unpacking, cleaning, settling in period. There are still hundreds of things left to finish up though. And I'm getting worse and worse at capturing everything with photos. I'm just keeping extremely busy doing all the little things around here.

I love how the kitchen tile catches the setting sun's colour.
& I'm hoping we have a less cluttered countertop.

Sunset earlier and earlier. * Sigh *

And last Friday, we got a nice stack of heat-treated wood
delivered! My awesome neighbour David is going to help
build our roof decking pavers! Yay!

Ain't it done yet?

We're still living in the basement. And working. Finally, though, I can write a blog post because we now have internet access!  Yay!  It's been more than a month without internet service- unless I tethered my phone. But on the weekend, my data plan on the phone was tapped out. So, thank goodness today the Cable Guy who apparently lives in the neighbourhood came and installed our internet service! Amazing, how no internet kinda' does weird things to communication.

Anyway, here's the latest:

Yay! the corrugated metal is done! And you probably
can't see it, but there is a black mesh preventing birds from
roosting under the PV awning.

Yay! Malkovich fixed the bad dent on the exterior deck door!

The carbonized wood soffit!

Soffit turns into fascia.

The signed bit of fascia installed by our special guests!

Sunrise over Suncor. Or is it Mordor?

Exterior is 97% done!

Interior deck wall gets Hardie'd.

Another sunrise over Mor... I mean Suncor.

So far, our PV system says it's saved 2240 lbs of CO2.
Do you believe it? Does it know we use coal-fired
plants here in Alberta?

And today the bulk of the concrete
countertop was installed! Yay!

The orange sink looks awesome on the
charcoal grey concrete counter.

And we're very, very close to being able to use the
induction range. What should be our first meal?