We live in a forest on the side of a small mountain. But our house is also just five minutes or so from the Castlegar’s downtown, so sharing our acreage with wildlife still seems rather surprising to me.
Recently we’ve been visited by a few reminders of where we live.
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I live in a mountainous region of south-central British Columbia, the central Kootenay. Jasper Park and township are over 700 kilometres from me. Despite the distance, I am able to imagine the shock and horror of fire destroying … well, everything. I feel, though, that this kind of disaster is just going to keep getting more frequent.
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Irene and I had several ‘priorities’ regarding maintaining our new home from the day we bought it. Some were ‘mandatory’: for example, we had to replace the aging but still fully functional hot water tank in order to get house insurance. Others were ‘urgent’, and at the top of that list was the outdoors stairway to my office above the garage.
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I had planned on posting something new about our stairway construction by now, an upgrade that was already delayed from 2021. Unfortunately that still isn’t done despite being ‘in progress’ since the beginning of May.
Instead, I’ve decided to post some pictures from around the house and a few words about how the year has gone. Most of the pictures have already made an appearance on Facebook- apologies for folks who follow me there as well. But the words are mostly ‘new’…
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The snowfall this year in Castlegar has been a bit…much. I’ve given my lawn tractor’s snowblower a good workout.
But memory is a fickle thing: our brains edit and generate content to create a story. So I decided to post a few comparison photos of our new Kootenay winter life.
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The cold has done some mischief to our plumbing here.
The same laundry room pipes as last year froze up first. Not great, but increasing the house temperature from 20 degrees to 28 degrees C and setting up some directed heaters will (I hope) eventually unthaw that. But then we made things worse.
There were a few things we knew we wanted to improve when we bought our home in Castlegar. Irene and I identified replacing the outdoor stairs to my office (the suite over the garage) as being the most ‘urgent’ of these.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like getting these stairs replaced is in the cards for 2021. But at least I have engineering diagrams!
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