. . . . . .The Extra long summer . . . . . . . : Changing spiders for snowflakes

Unbelievably its been over a month since we got back from our trip tp St Johns, and its been a really (without swearing) fucking busy month.

The kids have been on call for 2 weeks as well as completing installations for work and covering for Buffy as she has been teaching at the University of Winnipeg over the last few weeks. This also means that she has been working evenings to catch up on her actual work!

The kids have been going to scouts on Tuesdays as well as other scout events such as the Beaveree Ollie went to one Saturday afternoon.

Ollie has a new best friend from school - Bosley, so theres been the usual play dates to organize for that plus a few birthday parties to attend for other kids. Hannah has also been going to Bike club after school and she even has her first sleepover this coming weekend!

We have also been attanding a kids therapy class - for us not the kids - Its basically a weekly meeting to talk about teh kids and better ways to beat them! Haahaa actually I may have gotten that wrong - hahaha

We had thanksgiving at our place this year, too so we had to get that sorted out and in the middle of all this we have been renovating the sunroom. Well, we have been destroying the sunroom....

The sunroom is a room off our bedroom, which teh kids were using as a playroom. But it had no insulation, so was pretty cold in winter and boiling hot without windows open in summer. We know sooner or later the kids will need their own rooms too, so we decided to insulate and renovate the sunroom to at least give us more playroom or office options for when that happens.

So, literally a day after we got back from St Johns we started ripping the old walls down in the sunroom, in preparation for a new (level) floor, new (level) windows, spray foam insulation and drywall. We had about a month to do all this before the sprayfoam and window guys were booked - plenty of time!!

This is what it looked like when we started -

Then we started to get into the nitty gritty of it - including the 23 squirrel nests we found squeezed and packed on every horizontal surface behind the walls... These fucking rodents must have been living in these walls for years and years.

It was good to get it all cleared out and even the kids got involved, whacking and taking down walls wit a hammer!

At one point I was at home alone pulling boards out and what I thought was a head appeared - I shit myself and slowly continued to pull the wal lout. I discovered a 3 foot high hornets nest - luckily the hornets had left a while ago - It was huge and disgusting, but also beautiful and scary. You never know whats inside your walls - Buffy also found a dead squirrel in a wall, but I aint going to post that photo.

As we headed into the second week October we started to get teh last of the walls down and clear of squirrel mess. But we also had a big eavestrough running through the room and wondered what to do about it. We made a few phone calls and a good family friend who happens to be a building contractor came round to take a look - Chris not only helped with the fact that the roof was apparently not being help up by anything, but he removed the old eaves and then just for good measure also offered to rebuild the floor - which dropped 5 inches over 9 feet!

There was also the issue that the garage ceiling below was not secure enough to hold the spray foam insulation, so we pulled that down! Then me and Buff (with the help of a cool bit of kit called a drywall lifter) hoisted new 8ft x 4ft ceiling panels up and attached them to the new joists I had fitted earlier in the week - this was turning into a proper job!!

Once that was done we could remove the old floor from above in the sun room in prep for making a new one! After that Chris came in and after a bit of shopping (twice cos we bought the wrong wood) we got to putting in the new lever floor!

Unfortunately the floor wouldnt fit up eth staors, so we had to hoist it up a ladder and through the old windows!!

Anyway after the floor was cut and done - we had to remove it, just for a day to spray foam the new insulation under it, before putting it back overnight as the windows were being installed the nest day - and they need a floor to stand on - obviously!

I refitted the floor after the windows were installed and next was wall and ceiling insulation. This was a whole thing as there were gaps everywhere in eth old exterior that we had to fill or patch with plywood to stop the insulation just popping out like elephant toothpaste! We did a good job on that though - cos absolutely none came out!!

That was just earlier this week and now we have the drywallers in - The drywall is fitted and theres probably a week or so for him to pop in and out and mud and tape and rub and mud it all so it looks smooth and ready to paint.

I didnt even mention our old neighbour and pal Mike - who ran a new electrical circuit from eth basement and is fitting lights and power sockets for us! Thanks Mike!

Its all been a hectic few weeks with late nights and multiple showers daily - especially when covered in the dirt and crap that we had to dig out from the squirrel nests - we are nearly there though and should be able to start decorating in the next week or two!

In other news, the kids had a great Halloween - lots of evenings out looking at decorated yards and houses and a really good Halloween night - it was warm and no snow - so there were hundreds of kids out and our kids as usual decided to start giving away some of their collected candy after they got tired walking the neighbourhood. Hannah also has a scary mask and stod still by the tree shouting boo at eh trick and treaters to scare them! We also had a night at Boo at the zoo with our good mates Mia and Eric and their kids Jane and Tully - good times!

One of our favorite parts of Halloween is visiting the really well decorated houses - This year amongst many others, we visited one that is normally decorated for Christmas with lights and music - its crazy - We went this year as its decorated for Halloween too - The nice bloke that lives there came out with candy for the kids and I asked him how he moved from Halloween to Christmas lights and his simple answer pretty much sums up this time of year in Winnipeg -

'I just swap out the spiders for snowflakes'