The Shack: A Year in Review: Part 5

It has come to this. It is the last day of 2009, the last day of a year and a decade that will forever be remembered, and, of course, the last day of the first full year of Shacktacularness. To mark this auspicious occasion, I have put together a retrospective of the Shack in photos, featuring a lot of new ones so that you, the reader, know what the Shack looks like in the here and now!

Without further ado, I present 38-ish photos which define the Shack (note: captions will come in sets of two, underneath a set of two photos. Which photo they belong with will be indicated by the logically progressing numbers):

1) This is how the Shack used to look, around this summer.

2) This is an "artist's rendering" (aka my red lines and notes) describing what you would see nowadays.

3) This is the back of the Shack around summertime.

4) Another artist's rendering depicting what you would see now.

5) This is what the Shack currently looks like on Google StreetView.

6) Artist's rendering of what you might see now in real life.

7) Hauling shingles up onto the roof of the shop. Great fun.

8) Roofing the shop...note Dad's expression, evidently this brings him great joy.

9) This is what the side of our house where the porch was looked like in the thick of the porch-destruction.

10) A small example of the chaos that was our yard during the destruction.

11) Additional example of chaos - I think that pile of stuff used to be the porch.

12) Artistic shot of the reason it was difficult and rather dangerous to try and use the gate.

13) In case you've ever wondered, this is what stucco looks like on the inside. Pretty cool.

14) Dad popping out of the porch in mid-destruction.

15) General yard chaos during destruction.

16) Dad taking down the woodshed out back, also note the large dumpster on the left.

17) After the porch was gone, Dad set up this excellent temporary fence. He creatively used leftover rebar as posts.

18) The coveted "Shack nights" tally in my room. Each night I spend in the Shack, one more tally mark goes up. It is shown here at 131.

19) The warning that will greet you as you enter my bedroom.

20) Dad's innovative faucet handle which I have mentioned before.

21) The hole in the wall that has given the creepy bathroom its name and legacy. Note the light switch just beyond.

22) Home made warning sign displayed proudly on our basement door.

23) The Shack as it currently looks by night, holiday-type decorations and all.

24) What the hole in the ground (for the new house) looks like from inside the living room.

25) The large pile of dirt in the front yard... it is complimented by 2 in the back.

26) The Shack as it currently looks by day. Note the absence of porch and the large hole in the ground which extends from the front edge of the fence to the pile of dirt visible in the back.

27) The side of the Shack that used to be the porch. You can also see a bit of the new shop

in the back.

28) Similar shot, with a little more emphasis on the hole. Can you believe that hole is going to become a new house within less than a year?

29) One of Dad's finest innovations, a hole in the exterior wall (formerly int. wall of porch) that allows for an extension cord to reach our living room, powering our outdoor Christmas lights.

30) The back of the Shack as it looks today, note the complete absence of the attached shed, and the large pile of dirt in the foreground.

31) Large-pile-of-dirt-in-the-back #2.

32) Wider angle on the back of the Shack, shows evidence of both dirt-piles, and the absence of both the porch and shed. Also notable, of course, is the hole.

33) Dad's current pride and joy, the shop.

34) The back of the shop, including the basketball hoop which we so often use (really...) and the door that was acquired via a shed (see past entry entitled "Men in Shack" from Sept. 09).

35) View of the shop from my bedroom window. Notable is the skylight, and the clearly visible excellent roofing job (oh wait, it's covered in snow).

36) Slightly better view of the hole, gives an idea of depth. The hole is not very deep, because we are building the new house sans basement (we'll be building on concrete piles, which require a less hardcore hole).

37) The entire property as it looks nowadays from the front.

38) The artist's final rendering for now: a projection on what the property may look like

after phase one of the new house construction. The hole will be filled with a chunk of new

house, and the Shack will be eliminated, as suggests the red X.

And that brings us to the end of this grandiose year in review. As it turns out, it was exactly 38 pictures. I hope you have enjoyed seeing them, and I look forward to chronicling the Shack adventure in 2010. Happy new year!

The Shack: A Year in Review: Part 4

Reminiscing about Shack life so far is a lot like reminiscing about moving to an old house with significant structural problems, slowly destroying that house while you are living in it, having a massive hole dug in the ground right beside your house (and still on your property), and hitting your room's walls with a hammer at will. Oh wait - that's exactly what it is.

I realize that this whole time, via the blog and otherwise, I have basically been complaining about a situation that isn't really so bad. I know that we are lucky to have what we do, and that many live in a much worse situation. However, I also feel somewhat justified in complaining because, unlike most others in similar or worse situations, we chose to live here. Well, I guess "we" is putting it rather strongly. Dad chose this as the place for all of us to live, and after he successfully sold our other house, we didn't have many alternatives. This has been a good medium to lash out at him. Whenever he says anything about the Shack being less-than-ideal, or how much the new house project is going to cost him, I say, "you brought this on yourself." To sum up, despite obvious reasons why not to, complain I will! It makes for easier writing for me, and probably more entertaining for you. That being said, let's talk about life in the Shack.

The most noticeable difference between this new reality and my past one is the acute lack of space. In our previous residence, we had a spacious kitchen/dining area, large living room, 3 bedrooms complete with closets, a spare bedroom that also served as a computer area, 2 full bathrooms, a decent sized TV/family room in the basement, etc. Here, we have a very cramped kitchen with one place to sit and eat, a tiny half-bathroom on one end (the creepy bathroom!) and an improvised pantry-ish area. Our living and dining space is synthesized into one, with not much room at all to either live or dine with more than 3 or 4 people. The "master bedroom" is a sectioned off part of the living and dining room (it used to be one big area, now it's 2 rather small ones). They call it the "sleep in closet", and for good reason. Speaking of closets, the total number of those in the Shack is ...*drumroll please*... one! It is situated in the room that is the actual master bedroom, which serves as our TV room, and also Raya's sleeping-place when she's home from university. The other "legitimate" bedroom is mine, my closet-clothes reside on a closet rack with a wire shelf attached, like one would often find in -you guessed it- a closet. My bed takes up about a third of the space in there, but that's all right, because all I really do in there is sleep anyway, or do homework, read or play instruments, all of which I do while sitting or lying on my bed. The computer (where the magic happens re. this blog) is shoved awkwardly into a nook in the upstairs landing, just outside the bathroom door. This nook is also on a different level - about 3 inches above the rest of the floor - so you have to be careful as to how far you lean back. What I have just described is about the extent of the Shack, unless you count the dank (basement). Down there we have storage, laundry, and a room that used to be someone's bedroom, which I now use as a photo studio or place to play fussball in.

The lack of space is basically the center of all the complaints I have about the Shack. If all 3 or 4 of us are in the kitchen, it is very difficult to move anywhere, or get anything, without having to climb over someone, which for some of us, such as Dad, feels like quite an invasion of personal space. If there are more than 5 or 6 people in the Shack for a meal, some people will likely have to eat upstairs, or on the couch in the living/dining room, or anywhere they can manage to sit down. Naturally, we don't do a whole lot of hosting. Another issue with lack of space (or lack of more than 1 shower) is Dad wandering around the house in less-than-adequate clothing either before or after taking a shower. Admittedly I do that was well, but my room is only a few paces from the bathroom, whereas he goes basically all the way through the house on his journeys... it's hard not to come into contact with him at some point. The third complaint I wish to share with you is the inability for me, or anyone else really, to "get away" at times, if I/we are temporarily weary of interacting with our fellow family members in such an intimate setting. I guess this whole thing could bring us closer as a family... miracles have been known to happen.

The biggest upside (and pretty much the only one besides the location, now that I think about it) to the Shack is our ability to do whatever we want with it. I have talked about this before - my walls are covered in colourful permanent marker messages, the best of which is probably my "Shack nights" tally (which is up to 131), as well as host to multiple nails, screws, dents from a hammer, etc. Whenever I feel like putting something in, I need just do it! However, Dad did warn me a couple days ago, upon seeing my array of musical instruments hung up there, not to put nails too close to a certain corner, because there are electrical wires there! Thanks, father, that information was very useful after I hung a flyswatter quite close to said corner! Another example of this freedom being put to good use is the manner in which we hung our Christmas stockings this year. We did it simply by putting screws in the wall! This will be radically different in the new house, of course. Some say we're going to miss this place, but I think I'm willing to sacrifice such freedoms for a little more space (though phase 1 is likely to be another adventure... we'll get there later).

And that is our living situation. It isn't exactly pretty, but we've been pretty good at making do with what we've got so far. Though a somewhat irritating reality, the memories are fairly priceless, and will probably only get better during the whole construction/moving again/constructing more process. What has happened on that so far, besides the construction of the shop, has been a fair bit of destruction, by way of the now deceased porch, attached shed, and large shrubbery that was in the way of the porch. Doing all that was rather fun, though it felt weird to be destroying the house I was living in. The fence has also been rearranged a little bit to better suit the positioning of the hole, but to still prevent Bruce from planning any daring escapes. Now, we just have to wait out the winter, and then the real fun will indeed begin. Look for the final part of my year in review within the next couple of days: the Shack in pictures!

Sidenote: You may also have noticed that the photos on the right side of the page are no longer there. I thought it best, since the Shack does not look like that at all anymore. New context photos may soon take their place.

The Shack: A Year in Review: Part 3

Yes, the "year in review" entires are coming a little more rapid-fire now. As I mentioned before, I feel as though I should finish reviewing the year before the year is finished. That said, let's get to it!

I alluded to this yesterday... the Shack is not the only building on this property that has its stories to tell. Just a few paces north of yonder Shack, extending close to the threshold of the back alley, one will find what we have affectionately dubbed "the shop". This shop has become the new office of the one and only "Village Casketmaker", also known as Dad. The current function of the shop, however, is not nearly as interesting (from my point of view) as the long and laborious process it was to create this shop in the first place. I'll start from the very beginning.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth...

All right, that's a little too far back. Incidentally, that was Genesis 1:1. [Sidenote: My apologies to any atheists reading - for you the story is told more like "in the beginning, there was nothing, and then it exploded"]

But I digress. For the shop-creation story, I will go back to June of 2009 (which is a good number of millions of years later). It was in this month of June that the construction of the shop began. The first thing that needed to be done was to prepare a place for concrete to be poured, which would make - wait for it - a garage pad! Of course, doing this with Dad was a long and meticulous process. The first step was flattening out a good space with a rented gravel compactor. That was not one of the more fine-detailed tasks. The best you could do was try to keep the 1000-pound monster going relatively in a straight line. After that came the more precision-intensive tasks. The most memorable of these, for me, was cutting and laying endless amounts of rebar in a very specific grid pattern (confused as to what rebar is? Check our earlier entries of this blog, or click here). Cutting the stuff was quite fun - I had to use a reciprocating saw with a very sharp blade to cut these bars of reinforced steel. For a couple days after one particular shift I couldn't feel about a quarter of my left thumb from the vibrations.

Another thing I had to do was glue endless amounts of little holders for the rebar to little plastic bases. Obviously, this being done for Dad, it had to be done "just so". It took me a good half hour or 45 minutes (at least) the first time, and as if that wasn't enough, I had to do the whole thing over again with hot glue the next day because the first type of glue hadn't worked out. Oh well!

After the rebar had all been laid, Dad made an intricate system of red tubing that would later become his in-floor heating. I wasn't heavily involved in this until one fateful evening. This tubing, you see, was affixed to the rebar with hundreds of little plastic ties. Wait, it gets better. Every single one of these hundreds of ties had to be clipped using shears in preparation for the pouring of the concrete. After doing that, the only part of my body that hurt more than my back was my hands, which were both basically covered in blisters.

Once all this business was over, Dad hired some people to pour the concrete - people that didn't show up as scheduled at least twice, and finally got the job done two or three days later than we had first expected. Now that that was done, the fun parts began! Well, not quite. The forms (basically miniature wooden walls that made sure the concrete went where it was supposed to) had to be stripped, so Dad put me to work with a crowbar, sledgehammer, and drill. It was a very good outlet for any applicable frustrations.

After that, we started the framing. This was probably my favourite part of the process, because it's when you can really see the thing start to take shape. My job was mostly to cut the studs with the sliding compound miter saw, which will likely end up being a great life skill. Slowly but surely, walls were taking shape, and before we knew it, we were ready for a roof! Well, roof trusses anyway. This was another adventure in deliveries/people showing up on time... once again, they were late. In spite of this, a diligent team of three (myself, Dad and Raya) got those trusses where they needed to go in less than 2 days!

Eventually everything else fell into place. Bare studs/trusses became a plywood shell. This would've been around the time that we moved in, because I can remember the plywood roof being covered in tarps in an effort to stop rain from getting in (and getting all our stored stuff wet!). Soon thereafter Mom and Dad chose appropriate shingles, and we set to work giving the shop a more legitimate roof. Is it sad if I get those "warm, fuzzy feelings" reminiscing about beautiful, warm summer days spent laying shingles up on that roof? Oh well, I can't deny the truth. I do remember those days fairly fondly, probably because the weather was so nice, and we get a decent view from the top of the shop (I'm looking forward to the new [tall] house!). Anyway, the plywood shell avec legitimate roof soon became shell with roof and many holes in the studs with wires running through them (aka electrical!). After that would come insulation, drywall, and finally... siding!

If you can believe it, the siding-delivery guys were late too. We seem to have a terrible track record with this kind of stuff. Such is life. Despite this, we managed to get the siding on before the snow set in, thanks almost entirely to the unseasonably warm November we experienced this year. This is essentially how the shop stands now. Dad looks forward to the day when it will no longer be filled with all our stuff, because then he will finally have full reign over his 680 square foot paradise. That is, until we park the car in there.

Looking back, it seems like it took a whole lot of work to build this edifice. Looking forward, it will probably feel like nothing compared to the new house... oh joy! At least the new house will create plenty of work for me, and thus I will be able to pay my debts to my parents, who are sending me to France over spring break 2010. Only a couple hundred hours worth of work and I'm thinking we'll be even. This is gonna be fun!

Come back soon for part 4 of my 5-part series, where I will look back on some general highlights of Shack life so far. Part 5 will hopefully come around New Year's, and feature a photographic retrospective on the Shack. Stay tuned!

The Shack: A Year in Review: Part 2

Merry Christmas to you, devoted reader! If you happen to be a new reader, I suppose you're allowed to have a merry Christmas as well.

Having just returned from a nice leave of absence from the Shack that took me and the family to Minnesota, I have decided it is high time I continued reviewing the year before the year is over.

When I left off, we had just acquired this new shack, and on the very first day we owned it, it was in fact dubbed "the Shack". At the time, this shack was not looking very healthy. It was dirty, rather foul-smelling, and somewhat dangerous to walk in... the basement was also, for lack of a better word, quite dank (some things never change, to this day we call it "the dank"). I remember thinking that Dad would have to pull off a miracle to make this thing habitable, and maybe borderline respectable. And although I, like many others my age, hate to admit that my parents can do anything right, I must say he did indeed pull off that miracle. He installed brand-new carpet in the upstairs, which made me feel much more comfortable about living up there. He also sectioned off the large living-dining area into two smaller rooms, one of which became Mom and Dad's "sleep-in closet", the other becoming our (somewhat cramped) living/dining room. Not much was done to the dank... it wasn't worth trying to make it into anything but storage space. However, Dad did paint over the walls in the one bedroom that is down there. They had been a lovely orange and purple flame pattern, with permanent marker writing all over them, a lot of which was rather rude. You can still see some of this original pattern and these scrawlings through the light yellow paint that now covers those walls. This room is the one that we have our fussball table in, and also one that I use as a photography studio from time to time - when I can handle the dankness.

Advancements were also made in the world of plumbing - the upstairs bathroom sink faucet lacked a handle, so instead of buying a new one, Dad decided to be thrifty. I can't remember exactly what the tool is called, but it looks somewhat like a fancy pair of pliers that is now affixed to the upstairs sink, functioning as its handle. There is no temperature indication - one must simply remember that left is hot and right is cold. And as if that were not enough bathroom-innovation, Dad did something possibly even more amazing, or weird, depending on how you look at it. He took the rather unappealing end of the kitchen, which may have been a pantry at one point, but had the proper fixings for some plumbing, and made that rather small space (about 2 feet by 6 feet or so...) and made it into a bathroom! It is, I suppose, technically a half-bathroom, complete with dual flush toilet and large laundry sink... and a door! There are a couple things that some may not consider to be features, however. The walls are made out of hardboard, and are no more than 1/8" thick. Though they are entirely opaque, creating enough of a physical barrier that you feel you have some privacy, sounds escape (into the kitchen, no less) very, very easily. And if that's not enough to make you feel somewhat exposed, there is, in fact, a rectangular hole in the wall, right by the sink. There is a good reason for this hole - the light switch for the kitchen is in fact placed inside the bathroom! Therefore, the hole is entirely necessary, and placed such that nobody can really see anything from outside except for maybe the back end of the sink, but it's still somewhat unnerving, especially because it has to be large enough for people to stick their hands in there! Mainly for this reason, this bathroom is referred to as "the creepy bathroom".

Now, while all these improvements were being done, we were still not entirely sure whether or not we were actually going to end up living in this shack. This was basically being done "just in case", or for the purposes of renting the Shack out short-term (we in fact did rent it out for a month). Of course, I was still opposed to the whole idea of having to live in this thing, but things slowly fell into place over the spring months of 2009, and before we knew it, we had sold our wonderful new house and were preparing to move into the Shack.

Moving in itself was quite an adventure. One of the greater logistical challenges was the fact that it was raining quite heavily on our one main moving-day, so many tarps were used in many ways in efforts to keep our stuff dry. The other problem was where to put everything... even though we still had the porch and shed in those days, the Shack was not nearly as large as our previous house. A lot of our stuff ended up in the shop, and has remained there. The problem with that at the time was the fact that the shop was not nearly finished, and things needed to be carefully placed under the ramshackle roof so that they wouldn't get wet. Otherwise, it was just a matter of trying to fit everything else in. I remember having several people helping carry things into the porch, where Mom would either direct them to the appropriate place for what they had, or take the things herself and carefully place them somewhere in the porch. Her Zerbe instincts helped us find a place for everything. At the end of that day, which was July 29th, 2009 in case you were wondering, we celebrated our first day/night of living in the Shack by cramming 10 people into the aforementioned living/dining area and ordering pizza. Somehow this all feels like a long time ago now... has the Shack perhaps become normal reality in my mind? Oh boy.

Look out for part 3 of the year in review: coming soon! In it I plan to discuss the parallel universe in the backyard - aka the building of the shop!

The Shack: A Year in Review: Part 1

It's true. The Shack adventure has officially been going on for over a year. The date we took possession of the new house was December 1st, 2008, and here we are on December 8th, 2009. And what an interesting year it has been. For the rest of the month of December I plan to reflect on what the experience has been like so far (as well as include any new and exciting developments should they come about), building up to a fairly full retrospective in pictures, hopefully to be released around New Year's. I will begin at the beginning, that seeming to be a logical place, and take you back to when I first discovered the Shack, and retell the thrilling tale of how the Shack got its name.

I remember walking into the Shack for the first time on that aforementioned December 1st. There was no furniture, little carpet, and an air of unkemptness to the whole place (which went along with the air of not-a-very-pleasant-smell). I was with Mom, as Dad was out of town somewhere. Where, I am not sure. Probably BC, the lucky man. Having toured the place with my uncle Gord earlier, she pointed out a couple of terrific features, one being the floor in the master bedroom. A fix job had been done on it using, not any logical floor-materials, but particle board. Because of this, that section of floor sank a good 3-6 inches when you set foot on it. We also had a task that very cold evening, to install a hasp for a padlock on the back door, because at that point the Shack did not actually lock properly (not that there was anything valuable in there, but for insurance reasons/plain old fashioned logical ones, this had to be done). It was fairly difficult to do in the - now gone - dimly lit attached shed with winter gloves making both our sets of hands remarkably less nimble, but eventually we got it on right, and nobody died (an accomplishment, considering I was handling the drill).

Later that night, I spoke to Dad on the phone. He asked what I had thought of the new house. Taking into careful consideration all the factors - the uncleanliness, the sinking floors, the upstairs bathroom sink which at that time didn't even have a faucet, the basement in general, the crumbling foundation, etcetera, I chose my words carefully. The words that I remember speaking a full year ago (repeated elsewhere on this blog, I'm sure), were, "You cannot even call that thing a house. It's more like a shack." This, I believe, was the pivotal moment, for it was then that this house was first referred to as a shack (later to become the Shack, the definite article used because we're talking about a particular shack here, same notation for the capital letter on "Shack"). The label given to this place at that moment is essentially responsible for the way everything else happened. Yes, the shop would've still been built, I still would've moved against my will, we would've still knocked down the porch, etcetera, but it is the name Shack that has given this whole experience a somewhat surreal feeling, a spirit that it otherwise may lack. The Shack is no longer merely a name. The Shack is a way of life.

That is how this tremendous affair began. Little did I know one year ago that I would really be living in this place now. I was aware that it was a possibility, but nothing was definite yet at that point. Stay tuned for part 2 of my year in review. It will include thoughts on Dad's revamping of the Shack to make it inhabitable, and quite possibly something else!

Tis the Season...

The season of Advent is evident all around us. Decorations are being hung, cookies being baked, and friendly wishes of a Merry Christmas are being exchanged. Actually, in these times I suppose it would be proper to say "the holidays". Happy holidays...do you have friends coming over for the holidays? I wonder what I should get her for the holidays...it doesn't exactly have that same ring to it. However, I am not against either the recognition of other celebrations that occur around this time of year or the incidental movement away from the holiday meant for Christians to celebrate the birth of their Savior being branded as an occasion for overconsumption. I also realize that that's not what this blog is about. So back we shall go to relevance.

Although there is barely room, and we barely had time that day, we put up the Christmas tree on the first Sunday of Advent as we have done most other years according to family tradition. Other decorations around the Shack are fairly minimal due to the total lack of space. One thing we did this year that we never have done, and likely will never do again, was hang our stockings on screws driven into the living/dining room wall. We also have a lovely little lights display outside in the one part of our yard that still resembles a yard. Lights were beautifully strung around a park bench beside a tree, then wound around said tree, by my father. The one disappointment with this setup is the fact that he hooked them up to a timer, the idea being that the lights would be on when it was dark outside, which at this point is most of the time. However, this timer has different ideas...that, or it just has trouble keeping up, because the lights have not been going on regularly without precise maintenance. Despite all this, the Shack certainly has elements of cheer about it. Dad describes the decorations as "lipstick on a pig". I would think he'd be more kindly towards the Shack, since this was all his idea. Sometimes it just feels good to reiterate that fact.

Here are a few photos of our decorations/decorating process. Miraculously, Blogger agreed with me today!

The stockings! When in doubt, fasten things to the wall with screws or nails.

Raya in tree-decorating action.

Mom re-acquaints herself with an old friend, the artificial Christmas tree.

This shows Dad's role in the decoration process...