Work continues

260 cm by 120 cm sheets of drywall, with 6 cm of polystyrene insulation

As you can see above, the 26 sheets of gyproc and extruded polystyrene insulation have been moved into the attic.  It seems silly that no one thought to take a picture during the transport, but it was a labour-intensive process that needed all hands on deck to accomplish.  Bryan, Kiana, Tiffany, Lawrence, Malcolm, Duncan and I were involved at various times, and it was a pretty tricky thing.  The sheets had to be loaded onto the Hammers' trailer at the store, and then when we arrived here, they had to be carried one at a time up the stairwell vertically, with multiple people passing them through the "keyhole" of the staircase, and different sets of lifters running upstairs past others to help take the weight at each floor.

Fortunately none of the sheets were damaged in the move upstairs, and they are now sitting there, ready to get lifted up onto the roof and attached directly to the roof rafters with long drywall screws.  I think that I will wait until both boys are all finished their final school activities before I start installing the sheets, so that I can use the two of them to help hold them up.

Malcolm's last day is today, and then he has a school concert tomorrow evening, where we will be happy to hear a classical guitarist play his 1880 de Torres.  Tonight is his last night in the student rooming house; we moved most of his stuff out on the weekend, but will take the last bits out tomorrow morning.  Duncan had his last exam yesterday and so is spending social time with his friend Arthur in Brussels today.  He seems confident that the results of the exams will be good; we hope that will be the case.

On Saturday we went to Lawrence and Tiffany's to have a big BBQ and a party, to celebrate Tiffany's birthday.  Malcolm and Duncan came with me, but Maggie absolutely had to stay home and work on her student evaluations... for each of her approximately eighty students she had to summarise their yearly evaluations, and grade their final project, while writing a unique paragraph or two for each student explaining everything.  She managed to finish Sunday morning, but it was a tough slog.

I've been doing some work in the garden, moving compost to enrich the soil, and taking the first harvest of some garlic cloves that I planted back in November.  The strawberries are pretty much done, and the raspberries have been ripening unevenly so we've just been picking and eating them for fun.  We've taken one harvest of rhubarb, and just had a good harvest of red currants last week...

... that Maggie used to make one batch of jelly.  We received a bunch more from our neighbours yesterday, and then supplemented those red currants with some from our other plants...

So I am making another batch of currant jelly from the juice today.  I also planted some zucchini, and squash, and a couple of rows of mixed leaf lettuce.  It's nice to have a garden again.