Author Archives: Court

About Court

This is Courtney Vallentyne's blog.

Heat Ledger

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Rob and I wisely planned a deck work day for one of the hottest damn days in recent memory, so if my recollection of the work done is a little hazy, it’s because I was woozy from the heat.  It was something like 35C out on Saturday, not sure what it got up to with the humidity, but needless to say the heat was punishing.

First step, off to spend some money by buying long wooden boards, sonotubes (not a new age musical instrument, as it turns out), cone footings, and the like.  We stopped for a coffee on the way home because it was so early and then both of us immediately stopped drinking them because it was already so frigging hot.

Then, time to wreck the house and actually remove some siding.  This was a pretty big moral victory since the only change to date was to the dirt in the yard and my bank account.   Finally a tangible change to the house was visible.  Um, you can put that back together, right Rob?

Fortunately, Rob knew exactly what to do and with very little drama we had a ledger board installed.  Ok, there was one terrifying moment when we thought we would have to remove the board because it was just ever so slightly in danger of collapsing an entire deckful of future Vallentyne party goers, but then we figured it all out and life was good.  Here’s what it looks like.

So, that’s a terrible, terrible job all done without any incident, and we didn’t even fall in the hole behind us, so that’s a miracle really.  That Heat Ledger* is one sexy damn board.  Hope the rest of the deck looks as good.

*Too soon?

 

Digging a hole

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For the second installment of the Vallentyne Deck Build saga, things get a little dirty.  Finally, some real action.  Enough of the paperwork, let’s get Fifty Shades of Dust on this thing.

Actually it’s nowhere near as dirty as that.  I should mention that the most important decision I made that improved the quality of the finished deck by 2000% was to hire a professional – Rob Ross from Ross Renos.  I take full credit for how good he is going to make everything look.  I’m so smart.

So, despite my instinct to just grab a shovel and dig wildly, apparently there’s stuff that professionals do that are all “measurey” and “accurate”.  Sheesh.  There’s nothing spontaneous about load bearing structures apparently, or at least anything they do that is spontaneous is usually of the bad variety.  So Rob gently wrestled my shovel away and gave me the end of his measuring tape and we got to work.

First, the auspicious beginning.

Then, after much measuring and thinking, and a redesign on the fly of the stairs (huh, that was kind of spontaneous, I guess), we ended up with the world’s most boring croquet setup.

 

Then, in a fit of responsible activity that is totally uncharacteristic of me, I went and hired ANOTHER professional to dig the holes that the City of Ottawa decided needed to be no less than 5 1/2 feet deep.  That is a deep hole.  My pipe cleaner arms would probably not have been up to the task, so I’m grateful to Rob for hiding my shovel.

The major equipment.

 

That’s not much of a hole, there operator.

Oh.

So, yeah, those are some frigging huge holes.  And notice the unbelievable neatness of the holes that no doubt would not have been the case even if I had been able to dig these suckers myself.  So also yeah, good job me, for getting off my wallet.

Now, we need to get these suckers inspected, and the next step is footings, which sounds like a dance the kids do these days but is actually the thing that holds the deck up, so I’m told.  Sounds like a good place to start, doesn’t it?

What will happen in the next installment?  Will I continue to take credit for the work of others (probably)?  Will we be able to fill in the holes?  Stay tuned and find out, children!

Part 1 of the Saga

Vallentyne Deck Build

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If there is one thing I know how to do, it’s procrastinate on a big home project.  I’m the master at putting it off.  Even when I really want the thing in question to be done, I’m able to really bear down and ignore the CRAP out of it.  It’s certainly one of my many talents.

At any rate, it was time.  And the time was decided to be now.  Not later.  Or, not much later, sooner being better than later, but while it was a little later, it would NOT be a lot later than the present. So, indeed, let’s begin. Shortly.

See what I did there?

Anyway, so here we go, a little documentation of the build process, some pics, the whole nine yards.  First up, the plans.

Nikki and I started with a visit to the friendly folks at Home Depot, who were all too happy to design a deck for us and help us arrive at some decisions.  One of the first ones was to not use composite decking materials.  At all.  It’s incredible space age stuff, worry free, maintenance free, lizard free, the whole thing.  But it’s not “incredibly expensive free”, and so we will be using good old arsenic soaked pressure treated unless there is a very very good deal on cedar to be found.

Here’s the grainy overhead view of my shaky pencil drawings that depict the structure I will trust with the lives of my family and friends.  I’m sure it will be fine….

Now it’s to find out if the City of Ottawa will issue a permit based on these pieces of crap.  Then, I will document the painful digging of my backyard for your viewing pleasure.  Stay tuned folks.

 

There’s busy, and then there’s Walmart Meth busy

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Nikki and I continually talk about being busy;  “Oh man, that was a busy weekend”, or “Jeez it’s a busy few days”, but I have to admit I have never been quite as busy as this lady:

While shopping at Wal-Mart she decided to accidentally save some cosmetics for later in her purse.  Needless to say she ended up having an altercation with the store security folks.  This by itself is lamentable, but apparently the real problem arose when the security folks discovered that she had a 20oz pop bottle of meth “cooking” in her purse.  Wal-Mart security apparently had no sense of humour at all about the pace of today’s hectic lifestyles, and decided to evacuate the store given the propensity of meth to do things like “poison everyone nearby” and “explode”.

Clearly she was just multi-tasking, I mean this kind of thing isn’t something you can just leave lying around the house when you leave to go lift some eye shadow from the closest ‘Mart.  I salute you, as-yet-unnamed-defendant and your attempt to really make the most of your time here on Earth.

Follow this story here.

 

Fat Math

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As I mentioned recently, knowing the math behind something doesn’t necessarily mean that your behaviour will change.  Still, this article is a really neat look at how some smart nerds created a mathematic model to predict weight gain based on some general inputs.  They further modeled the root cause of why obesity is such a crushing problem today.  They concluded that the main reason isn’t a sudden lack of activity in the last 30 years, but rather the relatively sudden overabundance of food, most of it bad for you. 

In the 1950s, when I was growing up, people rarely ate out. Today, Americans dine out — with these large restaurant portions and oil-saturated foods — about five times a week.

Right. Society has changed a lot. With such a huge food supply, food marketing got better and restaurants got cheaper. The low cost of food fueled the growth of the fast-food industry. If food were expensive, you couldn’t have fast food.

People think that the epidemic has to be caused by genetics or that physical activity has gone down. Yet levels of physical activity have not really changed in the past 30 years. As for the genetic argument, yes, there are people who are genetically disposed to obesity, but if they live in societies where there isn’t a lot of food, they don’t get obese. For them, and for us, it’s supply that’s the issue.

For my money, you never ignore the math nerds, sure there are problems with modeling, but man it’s compelling stuff overall.  They link to a super cool java Body Weight Simulator that is fun to play with too.  For me the most interesting bit of the article was this:

…the conventional wisdom of 3,500 calories less is what it takes to lose a pound of weight is wrong. The body changes as you lose. Interestingly, we also found that the fatter you get, the easier it is to gain weight. An extra 10 calories a day puts more weight onto an obese person than on a thinner one.