House update

Well the house is coming along and the walls are up.  We're hoping that the roof will make it's appearance in the next week as the weather has taken a turn for the worse.  I got a shipment of snowshoes for the school and I might be using them sooner than expected!

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Kids Coffee

Evan loves to help out when it's coffee time.  So to make it more enjoyable, he gets a coffee too!  It's of course hot chocolate, but it's his coffee as far as he's concerned.

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Halloween

So first of all, I sucked this year for costumes.  The sad thing is I bought a couple of things at value village, but I didn't try them on first.  Apparently Dora thought they were too tight for school.  Personally, I would have ruled the school!

Anyways, with my inappropriate costumes out of the way, lets get to the great costumes, the boys.

The boys were great in their costumes and Logan this year took the lead.... literally, running ahead of everyone just to come back, way too excited, to explain what treats were up ahead.  Evan figured it out pretty quickly and mastered the all important "Trick or Treat"

It was a quick 20 minutes as we go to Trunk or Treat, an alternative where everyone just parks in a parking lot and the kids go around to the cars.  It works great for the little kids as they get a sweet haul in a very short time.
It was especially good this year with the weather being OK, just not great.

All in all, it was a great time with some sweet treats!  Literally!

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Our Home - 1 month later

It's been a month now and our home is well under construction.  You can follow a more detailed description at the other blog, http://riverridgehomes.blogspot.com/.  Regardless, here are a few pictures taken recently.

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Leaves and a Camera

With the fall weather in full swing and the leaves falling off the trees all around us, I decided to do some raking. Not for the sake of cleaning them up, but to play in them.  Tai was over and the boys had a blast tossing leaves on her as well as themselves.  I joined in for a bit and let Tai take a few pictures as well.  In the end, we had quite a few good shots.

I let Adobe Lightroom have a bit of liberty with the pictures and came up with these.

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Thanksgiving

In years past we've headed to the Coast for Thanksgiving, for the past 4 years I think.  This year we decided to stay home.  Not that we didn't want to head to Victoria, it's just that we felt this year was a good year to stay home.  Dora had lots of school work and the cost of flights would have been more expensive this year too.

As a bonus, we did have a great family dinner with everyone showing up.  This was especially important for family pictures!  It was decided that we needed a round of family pictures and this would be a great time to do it.  With the pictures done, I headed to my favourite tool, one I have not used in awhile, Lightroom.  It's amazing sometimes how the digital image can be manipulated.

Here are a few examples that I worked on last night.

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What can you build in less than 10 days?

We're 9 days into our hole and the progress is amazing.  I've done my best to document what's happened on our River Ridge Blog, but I thought I would quickly update here too.

We now have basement walls with sealant on them.  I'm not sure if this is a good pace or not, but it sure feels like it!  If any of you out there in home builder land have ideas or suggestions about what we should be doing, feel free to follow the blog and email/post any suggestions.  Better to add it in now rather than later.

For example, Mike from Vic suggested increased amp service.  So we have a 100amp panel in our garage and a separate 100amp panel in our house. 200amps of pure power baby!

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Canadian Please

For some reason, my niece asked me to find a song for her, Canadian Please.  Its a rather interesting take on being Canadian.  I have to love the fact that it's not Britney Spears or Justin Beiber... not that I have anything against them.  I personally have Britney on my phone as we speak.

Regardless, here is the song.  I use a program called tooble pro that lets me grab audio only from youtube videos.


I should mention, I came across this one first in my searching.  It's pretty good too, but not as "clean".  Several references to drinking and smoking, but take if for what it is.

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Week One Done

Friday is here and the first week is finished.  Amazed doesn't do justice to how we are feeling.  After months of preliminary work getting done, we have seen development at a pace that far exceeds our expectations.

Yesterday I was driving by and thought I would take a look at the site again.  Colour me surprized to see trucks on site.  In fact, as I approached the site I noticed forms.  Concrete forms for walls.  There were 4 guys hard at work forming up what will become our basement walls.  After a quick chat, I'm informed that they are planning to pour Friday at 10AM.

I our course came by today after school around 1:30 and saw no one on site.  Wondering if they actually poured I drove by for a closer look.  Sure enough, the concrete was poured!

This has been a week with daily surprizes and excitement.  I'm not sure if they can keep up the pace next week considering they will have to let that concrete cure before they can move forward.  Or at least that's what I think.  Guess we'll find out!

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Let the building begin!

Today we started the construction of our new house.  While day one was basically digging a hole, it was nice to get started.  I've decided to keep track of the building process on a separate blog, I figure it make be a busy process and thought it would be nice to have a running diary of the process.  You can follow it here

http://riverridgehomes.blogspot.com/

Obviously I'll make reference to it at times and post links here too.  They boys sure enjoyed helping out, but I suspect the excavation crew won't be as pleased.

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