Day 400: Containment

Of all the days I could be talking about containment, a day when thousands of people are stuck at home behind a pile of snow is probably an appropriate one. With the two of us coming from New Brunswick and Ottawa, we take any talk we hear around these parts about "snow storms" and "blizzards" with a grain of salt. That said, this is definitely the most snow we've seen since moving to KW in 2010 and they just don't have the resources to deal with so much coming down so quickly. Environment Canada even has an extra snowy icon on their forecast!

I guess the Environment Canada graphics designer is pretty excited about snow storms.

Let's hope the remediation contractors didn't get a snow day because the kitchen containment is supposed to be taken down today. We went into the house on Wednesday evening (with permission from the contractor) just to check things out. The kitchen was still out of bounds and it was a challenge to see through the thick plastic on a cloudy day at dusk.

Contained kitchen from the alcove.

View from dining room, where the fridge and all of our kitchen stuff now live.

From what we could see, it looked like the cabinets and plaster had all come down and the linoleum floor had been pulled up. We could see the hardwood but definitely couldn't see enough to tell if it's salvageable. I don't think we ever wrote a post about it but the lumber experts in the family had identified a small piece of the main storey flooring we found in a vent as oak.

Chunk of main storey flooring that had been cut for a floor vent, confirmed as oak.

Our life motto is "low expectations are the key to happiness" so we've been telling ourselves that the boards will be in rough shape after the gut. Given that there were still hundreds of little holes in the fir floor upstairs after we carefully pulled out the ring nails that held down the linoleum underlay, it's unlikely that a demolition crew would be quite so concerned about the salvage-ability of our hardwood. Oak is definitely harder than fir so that could be in our favour (high hopes) but let's just say we're preparing ourselves for a new floor (low expectations).

Unlike the kitchen, the upstairs bathroom had no asbestos problems so we were able to take a look at the progress up there. As of Wednesday evening, they had brought in a plumber to remove the toilet and the vanity but hadn't yet torn out the floor.

Before the tear out started, the contractor didn't know if they would need to remove the bathtub as part of the flood repair work. Apparently the floor under the tub is okay so the tub is staying in place. This means that it will be a straightforward task of re-installing the toilet and throwing in a vanity for a fully functional bathroom upstairs. Last time, I had talked about plans to temporarily finish the bathroom downstairs, rather than upstairs. Either scenario would involve a temporary vanity and now that we know the bathtub upstairs is staying (for now), we're thinking it'll be easiest to pick up a vanity and sink on Kijiji (people are selling cheap old ones for under $30 all the time) and hook that up upstairs. This will let us focus on properly finishing things in the basement bathroom.

With containment coming down today, we're supposed to get full access to the house tonight or tomorrow. The first order of business is putting up the shower trim tile in the basement. The shower door installer is coming by next week to put up the door so we've got the weekend to throw up some drywall, tile and grout. Definitely doable.