One down, one to go...

Just a quick tide-you-over post until next week as we're off for our annual baseball pilgrimage this weekend...

So far on this blog, there are two things that I have threatened with "fixing" via the Ol' Persuader. The boy-riding-a-fish statue from the backyard, and the toilet from hell.

Well, as the post title would indicate, one down, and one to go.




POW! Right in the kisser!

Well, you can't say I didn't warn it...

The roof, she is new, yes?

The single biggest thing that we knew was wrong about this house coming in was the roof. As a matter of fact, one of the reasons we could afford this house at all was because someone else had put in an offer on it, but the deal had fallen through once the potential buyers found out that the roof would absolutely positively need to be replaced within the year. So Frank, the owner, promptly dropped the asking price to account for the cost of a new roof, and the house fell right into our wheelhouse.

Needless to say, we'd been dreading this particular chore, and not only because of the price. Both the War Department and I have done roofing before - not a whole lot, mind you - but more than enough to know that there was no way in hell we'd be doing this job ourselves. We'd have to hire somebody, and that meant dealing with quotes, supervising gangs of deadbeat roofers and their delinquent helper monkeys, and all the other fun, fun, fun stuff that goes along with it. Not to mention the possibility of having to use vacation days to make sure the company we would hire was doing a decent job.

So imagine our surprise when we were absolutely inundated with recommendations for good roofers! There was only one company we were strongly warned away from, and having seen some of their work on houses in our old neighbourhood, we hadn't planned on even contacting them anyway. This was almost an exact opposite of the situation when we were looking for movers, by the way; in that case, we had exactly one recommendation, and uncountable warnings of shiftless deadbeat assholes. (For the record, the movers we hired were fast, on time, and generally awesome - and charged us LESS than the quoted price. Yeah. Just about gave me a heart attack.)

Well, we got a couple roofing quotes (one from the company our Crazy Neighbour^TM across the street used), and eventually picked the company who gave us an itemized quote and came with a hearty recommendation from some friends. (And also took the time to point out how our neighbour's roofers had screwed up, and how they would do it differently and why.) I must admit, I was a little concerned that the company we hired wasn't actually listed in the phone book, but they'd been in business for 25+ years based solely on word-of-mouth, so that had to be worth something, right?

Turns out, it WAS worth something: they did a hell of a good job. It took them a little longer then they had anticipated, partly due to getting some wrong materials from the supplier, and partly because of the BRUTAL temperatures during the first week. It was so hot, the shingles were melting! Well, okay, not melting, but walking on them would have scuffed them up too much, so they had to wait until later in the evening before they could lay out the shingles. On a couple of nights, they couldn't START shingling until seven p.m. (There was also a small incident with the War Department's favorite garbage can - don't ask - but that was resolved and it's all better now.)

Just for reference, here's the shabby mess we inherited from Frank (as usual, click any picture you want to see it embiggenated):





Yeah. Twenty-year shingles after twenty-five years? So not good. Very ungood, in fact.

Anyway, I could go on and on about how things went, but I figured pictures work best in SOME situations, so... here's a photo essay on the whole process - in chronological order. Enjoy!

Day One: Materials arrive, along with a garbage trailer (but no roofers, yet):



Day Two: Destruction!
I'm still completely amazed that they didn't break anything. Not even the statues, sadly.





Day Three: The first shingles (at 7pm):






Day Four: More destruction, more shingles








Day... Five? I dunno... I lost track about this point, actually. Why don't we just skip to the end? Here's the finished product.





God damn, that looks good, eh? The guys we hired were fantastic, and I'm pretty sure they got more work in the neighbouhood from neighbours walking by and admiring the result. I mean, why else would they leave their sign on our lawn for two weeks after they finished? Anyway, they have no web presence at all, so here it: Saanich Shingling Service - they're awesome, and I highly recommend them. (If a Google search brought you here, feel free to ignore the rest of my ramblings and just hire the roofers, mmmkay?)


But wait, there's more! That's right, it's the long awaited return of everyone's favorite feature (I'm assuming that This Week in Mayonnaise has not yet surpassed it, anyway),

The Injury Report

I bruised my thumb really badly the other day. That in itself is not exactly noteworthy, but as with the vast majority of my injuries, the humor is in the acquiring of the injury, not the injury itself.

You see, the crazy neighbour who lives up the hill behind us (the really crazy one, not the Crazy Neighbour^TM from across the street) found out we were giving away some of the statues and quickly volunteered to take them off our hands for us. Well, how could we say no?

So I helped load up her car with the crappy little mermaid, and the squirrel birdbath, and offered her one of the two peasant girls. Of course, she said yes, so I tried to move the closest one off its pedestal. Well, it was on there pretty tight (Frank must have used extra mayo) so I clambered up through the brush and weeds to the one in the back to see if I could get it off its base any easier. Unfortunately, the piece of statue I grabbed onto and pulled came right off in my hand, and whacked me in the thumb pretty good.

Still, this story does have a happy ending. First, I managed to get the other peasant girl off its base with a couple delicate taps from the Ol' Persuader, so the neighbour went home happy. Second, the statue I broke looks WAY better now, I think:



I've started calling it "Mary No Head", much to the War Department's chagrin. Come Hallowe'en, that thing is going to look damn freaky...

So, next post, I explain why these two unobtrusive, unassuming, unimposing vents in the middle of the roof (on either side of the vent stack) represent such a major effort on our part.



Stay tuned...

Hello? Is this thing on? Hello?

Wow... I kinda forgot all about this here blog thingy.

Or I would have, were it not for people constantly asking me when the next post was coming. (Still can't believe people actually read this nonsense, let alone wait expectantly for it.)

Of course, we HAVE been kinda busy...

What with the


and then the


and then the


Wait, what?

Yeah. That's somebody's idea of a joke or something. That, or the damn statues have started breeding.

Seriously, that just kind of appeared there one morning. I have no idea why or how, but if the deranged person responsible is reading this, STOP IT. STOP IT RIGHT NOW!

It's so not funny. NOT FUNNY.


Regular updates will resume shortly, just as soon as I can lick this damn cold.

So... where to begin?

I've been pondering this for a while now, and don't really know where to start. We've been in the new house for about five weeks or so and we've already done so much that it's hard to know where to begin.

Fortunately, I am a creative soul and I've come up with an idea. What follows is two separate perspectives: the first is the description of the house as provided by the seller's real estate agent in his listing/advertisement; the second is the description of the house if WE were the ones writing the listing... and maybe not actually trying very hard to sell it.

Don't worry - I'll include some pictures for those of you with shorter attention spans (*cough* Dad *cough*).


The text from the agent's listing:

This lovely 3 bedroom 3 bathroom 2360 Sq Ft Tudor style home is set on a .23 acre lot with several fountains, a pond, flowering borders, a rock garden and a greenhouse. Inside is a large living room with fireplace, a separate dining room, a large open plan kitchen with a sunny breakfast room and an adjoining large family room with its own fireplace and a sunroom leading out to the garden. Upstairs is a spacious master bedroom suite with lots of closets and a full ensuite bathroom with a deep soaker tub, perfect for relaxing. Two more sunny bedrooms and another full bathroom complete the picture. Located on a VERY quiet street close to walking trails and parks.

Sounds pretty nice, eh?

Now, here's what the listing would have said if the agent had been COMPLETELY honest:

This lovely 3 bedroom 2-and-a-half bathroom 2360 Sq Ft Tudor style home is set on a .23 acre lot with several thirteen assorted statues and fountains, a brackish pond, flowering borders, an unkempt rock garden and a somewhat ramshackle greenhouse. Inside is a large living room with a never-used fireplace, a separate dining room, a non-functional half-bath, a large open plan, terribly out-dated kitchen with a sunny breakfast room and an adjoining large family room with its own stained carpet, fireplace and a leaky sunroom with terrifically smelly carpet leading out to the garden through two doors with broken handles. Upstairs is a spacious master bedroom suite with lots of closets, dust-enriched drapes and a fully carpeted ensuite bathroom with a deep soaker tub equipped with a ridiculously low overflow drain, perfect for relaxing splashing around shallowly, and highlighted with fixtures chosen by Saddam Hussein himself. Two more sunny bedrooms and another full bathroom with leaky toilet complete the picture. Located on a VERY quiet street close to walking trails and parks.

Needless to say, I do have photographic evidence of all of this, but for now, let's stick with the statuary. Here is a sample (by no means an exhaustive collection) of the statues and fountains we seem to have inherited...

This is the only statue visible in the front of the house and really the only one that I kind of like.



I want to put him in a nice spot in the backyard and then surround him with a small tableau of grinning gargoyle statues, arranged as though about to eat him. I think that'd be cool.

This fine fountain features a trio of dolphins, each equipped with a water nozzle in its beak. (War Department added for scale.)



I cannot even begin to imagine how we're going to be able to get that thing out of there. It must weigh four hundred pounds - and no, I'm NOT talking about the War Department.

This fine specimen isn't really all that offensive... which, I suppose, is why the previous owner felt he needed TWO OF them:



This virgin Mary and her reflecting pool sit right outside the kitchen window:



Well, a friend took the Madonna away, so it's actually just a grotty old concrete pond now. I'll be smashing that up in the spring.

This is probably the largest statue in the yard, and despite appearances, is not a fountain. It's just huge. And ugly. And huge.



Did I mention it was huge?

This one... well, this one offends me on some deeply primal level:



I dunno. I mean, I look at that, and I just want to reach for a sledgehammer. I've told Amy that when the time comes - and the time will come - to remove that thing, the only way it's leaving the yard is in pieces. I simply can't allow it to continue to exist. Seriously. I can't wait to wind up and take a swing right at its curly little, water-squirting head. POW! Right in the kisser! And that goes for that crazy fish horse of yours, too! Ha ha ha ha!



Ahem. Sorry. Let's move on...

And finally, given that you're probably as tired of looking at inanimate blocks of concrete as I am of uploading pictures of them, I'll spare you the mermaid, cupid, and frog statues (no, I'm not kidding) and leave you with this "lovely" angel statue, perched at the top of the very back of the yard and, as this picture suggests, visible from the master bedroom window:



The deer? Heh, those are real. Man, I love this neighbourhood...