It got cold, I mean COLD!

Snow, ice, sleet, wind, cold, we’ve had a lot of weather lately. It snowed New Years day. We had about 8 inches of nice sticky wet snow. I built a giant snow man out back, but he lost his head overnight. Jenn and I walked over to a nearby park that turned out to be way bigger than we had thought. It’s huge! Funny how you discover such things on snow days. Then we walked into Hillsdale and had hot drinks at Starbucks. I had forgotten just how pedantic their servers are. I ordered a mocha latte and was assured that those are two complete different drinks, and which did I really want, a mocha or a latte? It took what seemed like an eternity to convey that I wanted an espresso, steamed milk, and chocolate, which if I had said ‘café mocha grande’ would have got me my desired drink without the lesson in Starbuckees. Despite the stupid pretentious corporate bullshit, we had a lot of fun that day in the snow. But, then it got ugly.

That weekend it got cold. I mean it got really cold, as cold as it gets in Portland. It was about 17 degrees with sustained 20 mile an hour east winds, which put the wind-chill factor around 0 degrees Fahrenheit. Then, Monday night, it started to snow. Then, Tuesday the snow turned to sleet. Then, Wednesday the sleet turned to freezing rain. By Thursday, we had about 7” of snow, nearly an inch of ice, the airport was closed, schools were closed, many roads around the area were closed, even the Trailblazers canceled a game for the first time in franchise history. Portland was a mess. The worst day for us was probably Tuesday night when it was around 20 degrees, sleet was coming down and the wind was gusting well over 30 mph. The furnace was running nonstop and all of the plastic covering the windows upstairs and the new stairway was flapping and popping in the wind. It was horrible. The next day I went up stairs and found snow in the sun room and in each of the bathrooms, suspiciously under each of the skylights. I hope this is just a coincidence and there is nothing wrong with those skylights, but it is suspicious. We’ll have to see. It does appear that the roof is leaking in a few other places, like over the back porch. I will show this to the builders and see what they say. It’s not so bad now, but if this happens again next winter when we have drywall and wood floors and furniture up there, it could cause a lot of trouble.

Because of the weather, the builders have not been at the house much at all this week. They did show up Monday long enough to receive the new dropbox, but not much else. So, where we stand right now is we have most if not all of the framing upstairs complete. The plumbing is mostly in, but not completely hooked up in the basement. The sunroom has walls and a ceiling, but no roof. There are no windows or the door upstairs. There is no electrical. They have cut the hole in the ceiling for the stairwell and removed the walls surrounding the old closets, but the remaining walls that will be removed around the stairs have not been removed yet. The kitchen has not been touched despite Jenn and I carefully removing everything that would be in the path of destruction. Almost nothing has changed in the house over the past 2 weeks. The overall theme of this project continues to be 'hurry up and wait.'