Renovation

Renovating the Reservoir beach

I was watching my weather app the other day, it was warning of severe thunder storms and tornados about to hit Toronto. As far as I know the tornados did not materialize, but parts of northwestern Toronto got lots of rain, flooding and power outages. Meanwhile at home a very under-reported storm was shaping up for the late evening. The forecast said a bit of rain coming in the late afternoon but not enough to trigger any warnings.

Wow, did they get that wrong! It was an almost record setting deluge overnight with flooding. My sump pump kicked in for the first time in months and was still working hard 24 hours later. Boy am I glad I got that pump and the French drains put in! Several shops in low lying areas had to remain closed yesterday due to flood clean up. Large parts of the Valley are below sea level with extensive dyking dating back hundreds of years, but it was the water coming down from the sky not in from the sea that was the problem.

The good news is, my basement stayed dry and my romaine seeds finally decided to sprout after I had given them up for dead. Who knew flooding was what they required. June and May were unusually dry but the weatherman more than made up for that in a single day, almost 75 mm of rain overnight. The record for July in these parts is 78 mm (set during WWII).

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I've been moving furniture the last few days. It started with the notion that I would get more weaving done in the winter months if I moved the loom from 'the loom room' which I don't heat in the winter time into the living room which I do heat. The living room is small and already chock-a-block full of furniture, so I had to come up with a floor plan that would accommodate the loom. I thought if I moved my desk out and the loom in it was doable. I also thought better to do it now than to wait until the current weaving project is finished, which could be months from now.

Obstacle #1: even folding the back beam of the loom up (it's hinged to do so), the loom is marginally wider than the doorway to the loom room. I tried to force it, thus messing up the recently completed threading of the loom. Reluctantly I backed off and proceeded to take the door off the hinges to obtain that extra half inch of width needed. It's an old door, very heavy, and as it turns out, the hinges are coming loose from the door frame. With great difficulty I got the door off the hinges. The loom passed through the doorway with maybe a millimeter to spare.

Obstacle #2: a loom in the living room makes the living room look like a textile factory. I had taken a lot of measurements and had determined that the loom would fit, but that didn't mean that it would look okay. It completely dominated the space due to its large length, width and height and also due to its very mechanical appearance. After the episode of the doorway I was not up for moving it back or for another round of furniture moving, but I did think that if I simply exchanged places between my favourite reading arm chair and the loom, its dominance would be less noticeable.

Obstacle #3: The loom looked better after the rearrangement and I was tired and hungry so I quit for the day. The next morning I realized that the new location of the arm chair was now blocked from the natural light coming from large windows at the front end of the room and I needed a lamp to be able to read when it was broad daylight outside. Plus I would not be able to see the birdfeeder from the arm chair in its new location, and the loom was set up in the wrong direction to see much of anything. Argh. I spent the whole day mulling that one over and realizing I was going to have to move almost every single piece of furniture in that small room to get what I wanted.

And also realizing that while taking measurements and arranging furniture according to its width and length and overall floor area was doable in my head, I was not taking height measurements and even if I was I could not really picture the effect in my head. I suppose some home decorating design app would take care of that but I was now in no mood to go hunting for such a beast and learning how to use it.

I spent yesterday moving the furniture again. I can now live with the current arrangement, in fact I think it is better than the old one. There are a couple of minor problems (such as having to move the pictures on the walls because their old arrangment now looks completely wrong) and I still have the clean up of the old loom room to do. I spent a couple of hours straightening out the warp threading after it got messed up on its passage through the too narrow doorway, and another half hour getting the door back on its hinges. One of the hinges is loose and will need repair, but I don't think I would have noticed that without having taken the door off in the first place, so I suppose that is a good thing.

I tried to convince Hapi that the newly empty loom room would make a good bedroom for her but she's not buying it. It was a warm night so I left the back door open in case she wanted to go out in the middle of the night. She did, but required help getting up the basement stairs so I had to get up for that. Today I have yet another car repair to take care of and I have to find another place for Hapi and I to go for a walk due to huge park renovations going on at the Reservoir.

Pandemic life at its best!