Holiday Weekend

I have generally been good about not making a lot of noise on Sunday’s and have generally spent the day doing office work and some site work like cleanup and the like.  But an event on Friday indicates I will have to be VERY careful as I seem to have a disgruntled neighbour a few houses down.   My immediate neighbours have been awesome and even have encouraged me to get things done on the weekend, and have helped to boot.  But it seems not everyone has the same supportive attitude.

I received this all second hand so who knows – there was a woman standing in front of the site and it looked like she was taking photos with their phone of the boulevard, my permit, etc and trying not to make it obvious.  It was 7:45 PM and I was just finishing up on the tractor loading some green waste into the trailer.  Another neighbour from down the street who was watching me with his son, informed me at 7:50 when I had stopped for the day, that she was upset I was working and “did I not know it was 8 PM?”

When I went to their house to ask if there was a problem, I was met by the husband who did not know his wife had been out and did not express any concern.  So I left asking them to please contact me if there ever was a problem and that I am allowed to work till 8 PM on weekdays (construction noise is allowed 7 AM – 8 PM Mon – Friday and 9 AM to 5 PM on Sat)

I have not heard anything more, but it has left a sour taste in my mouth.  I have tried to be very careful to not disturb my neighbours.  One of the reasons I do not start early in the morning is that I have a senior neighbour who does not get up very early and I committed to generally starting later in the day and then working till 8.  This allows me to get computer work done anyway and of course there will be exceptions (like the upcoming excavation).  So the thought that I have an upset neighbour and that I am always going to have to be on my toes is frustrating. What is even more frustrating is the sneaking around instead of just coming to me. We will have to see on Tuesday if she has filed a complaint and I get a visit from the bylaw officer (not that I was doing anything wrong in this instance).

Saturday entailed finishing loading a green waste run comprising of all of the waste stream created by taking down the bedroom.  It was one of the largest loads to date but fortunately quite light (aka cheap).

I also pulled down the final north wall.  When I pulled this wall down, I had hoped that the leanto shed attached to the side would stay in place, but alas I had attached it far too well (“You used too many fasteners!” as Ron likes to say), so the shed just rotated into the air when I pulled the wall down.  I am going to reuse this shed as my work and cutting table at the front of the site, so I spend to time cutting it off the wall and righting it again.  I also cut the roof into three sections to make the move easier.

The day was quickly coming to an end, so Ron and I rushed off to dump the green waste load so that the trailer was empty and I could move the rose hedge. In the couple of hours I had before my 5 PM cutoff, I drastically pruned the roses, bare rooted then to get rid of all of the weed roots (lots of bindweed), and transplanted the roses in Ron’s yard where they will be able to spread out nicely and live hopefully another 30+ years.  With a few minutes to spare, I finished levelling the ground where the hedge was and will now house 21 pallets of material and loading the pruning’s into the trailer to start the next green waste run.

Today I really should have done some cleanup and site organization, but generally spent the time in the office confirming my concrete order, researching how to hang my job site tarp, realizing I had another corrupt excel file from when I first moved here and had a power outage (and then spent hours in vain trying to find a backup copy of the file that contains all of my mileage records for my company).  I also have been trying to get rid of the final ship-lap, 2×4’s, windows, and plywood I do not need.  I had a couple of people come and take some.  I also had a person come for ‘all’ of the windows (should have been my first clue) and realized when they got here that they were a scraper.  SO I gave them one and sent them on their way and made sure I informed them that the place was under video surveillance. Tomorrow I have someone coming to get some of the windows for a shed, which is what I intended when I salvaged them.

Tonight I figured out how to have the webcams upload the images right to my file server in my office.  This will save an immense amount of time because I will no longer need to login to my hosted server’s FTP and download the images to my local file server every few days.  I need them local to view and edit them and now I am one step closer to the ability to create daily time lapse videos from each camera stream.

Tomorrow I will have to do some prep for Tuesday’s arrival of the ICF.  This will be quite work like raking dirt, moving wood, etc.  If it bugs someone, they are just going to have to bite me 🙂

Thanks for the visit.