Going to Canada eh ?

We sometimes refer to our house as a caravan or trailer but in fact it is in many ways closer to a Canadian house than a static caravan you would find in the UK.

Most houses round here are sort of one and a half stories high. The Basement is usually cast concrete and sticks up out of the ground far enough to have some short windows to let light in. Here you find the utilities like furnace, water heater, washer and dryer and some living space as well. The upper story is wood construction and this part is built with the same materials and methods as our “trailer”.

The main difference between our trailer and a house is that houses sit on basements while ours just sits on blocks.  But as we are very much attached to our house, we might take it with us, if ever we decide to buy land.  Not something a regular house owner can do.

We have mentioned before that the heating and hot water  systems are totally separate. The furnace supplies hot air which is then blown through ducts and out into each room, sometimes out of several ducts per room. The advantage this has over radiators is that in the summer it can be set to blow un-heated air into the rooms. OK not as cooling as air conditioning but still cooler that ambient due to “wind chill”.

The hot water supply had been woefully inadequate barely producing enough hot water for a bath. It was suggested to us that there may be a problem with the cold feed pipe inside the water heater. This proved to be the case when Lin called in a plumber to look at it and a couple of other things that needed doing.

The only outside tap was on the blind side of the house nowhere near the main garden areas or either of the doors.  So we had another one put in by the main door on to the deck.

We also asked him to look at the cistern in David’s bathroom as it was very slow to fill, and always noisy. At this point we discovered that despite the amount he was charging ($80 per hour) some things passed him by. He decided to cut the cold water feed to the cistern below the isolator valve so he could replace the valve.  At this point the pipe fell down the hole into the void below the mobile and he had to fish it out. As he also lives in a mobile, we thought  he would have known that would happen and clamped the pipe to stop it happening.

Anyway as a result of all that we now have enough hot water for several baths and can water the garden without taking a long slog around 3 sides of the house to turn the tap on and off.

Generally things are quite up to date over here but then occasionally you see something and think. Hey we used to have that years ago.

For example there is a game show called “Wipeout”. No its not the one with Paul Daniels. This has teams of people trying to complete various bizarre obstacle courses, just like It’s a knockout the bit with out Eddie Waring and Stuart Hall.

Also in the supermarket  we saw a couple of old familiar products. The Pilsbury dough  boy with part baked bread and cakes and the frozen concentrated fruit juices. Both of which are big runners her but both died long ago in the UK.

A number of other things appear to be straight out of the 70’s era. Like glass coasters with design and colours from the TV series Space 1999.  Also lava-lamps and kids toys to match.  We’ve also seen plenty of bake-lite early plastic stuff.

Over the past couple of weeks we have been installing a webcam so we can see who is at the front door. This is the same camera we had in the UK so one problem was to create an extension lead that had a UK socket on the end to provide power. Then we had to run the signal cable back to Lin’s PC. We had brought the interface card with us and fitted it to the PC . Using a mixture of ready  audio  and TV coax leads we ran the signal from the front door under the house and then drilled a hole in the bedroom wall to feed it into the PC.

This was our first excuse to get in to the crawl space under the house. We found we couldn’t crawl all the way across because all the waste water pipes were below the floors, but Pete was able to feed the cable from one side so that Dave could grab it on the other side.

Drilling the hole also proved to be a challange as the walls were over 8″ thick so Pete had to buy a drill specially for the purpose. It is all set up now but we still have to fine tune the software as there is some flickering of the images

Pictures from the Blackfalds Parade showing some sights you would never see in England.  Dave had 2 invitations to take part one from the cubs/wolf pack and one from the boy girl club.  He chose the boy girl club possibly because he didn’t want to walk.

Despite sleat and snow today and yesterday, the parade went ahead.  As you can see it cleared up and was in the end, quite bright but cold.  Unusual weather in June you might think, but not apparently here !