Gathering materials

Finding materials over a range of renovation stores and actually gathering them has proven to be challenging. We settled on LP Smartside for the siding of the shed and they only sell it at Home Depot. Michel and JJ woke early one morning to pick it up at Home Depot and as we do car sharing and don't own a car they wouldn't rent them one of their vans. They considered going to Discount to get a van but it was all so annoying that Michel opted for delivery instead.

But waiting for a delivery with no indication of when in the day they'll arrive is super annoying, plus the delivery van had great trouble accessing our lane as there is so much construction nearby and trucks are always blocking our lane. Nevertheless, the panels are in our yard now.

In the meantime, I have been pondering windows endlessly as I want to have ventilation in the shed that will provide a cross current, lots of light and space for an airconditioner in the summer. That combined with the challenges of the local stores and their lack of stock has been a puzzle. We went all the way out to Reno-Depot one night with our Communauto only to find their website lies and someone had bought up the shed window I wanted. So I insisted on getting a door while we were there, forgetting the Communauto for a moment. After that I spent a car ride sitting on the folded backseat next to the new door all bunched up into a ball. So yeah, I guess most people doing stuff like this have their own truck. This is why I wanted a kit! I exclaim to Michel.

The next adventure is seeing when the windows I ordered online from Home Depot will actually arrive. At least I am happy with our final choices ... we have a picture window for light, a skylight for photography in winter, and two little windows for ventilation. Well, in fact at this point we only have one of them but we have the intention of having the other three. Eventually.

While waiting for these details to sort themselves out Michel has built the wall frames for the first two walls. He's spent some time getting tarps to protect everything in case of massive thunderstorms that luckily didn't manifest yesterday. At Reno-Depot we found new roofing material, Ondura, that looks much simpler to install than asphalt shingles. Hurray! They come in black or red at that shop so we've decided the strong red is stylish. This means I have had to rethink the shed colour to match and in the end I didn't deviate far from my original choice, opting for a cheerful eggshell blue. With the white window frames and the red roof, it should be pretty stylish.

Meanwhile our neighbours to the left have their fence installed. Their handyman insisted on drilling a hole through our cement fence and putting our eavestrough through it. Seems like a bit of an imposition but fine, it's done now. He also re-installed bricks along the bottom of our yard. My dad called to say we must block the bottom of the shed against vermin, and after a newstory about a python in Verdun Michel was convinced enough to put a line of old bricks along the bottom of the base. No pythons for us!