frosty morning in Wavre
To pick up from my last blog post, the rest of the Toussaint holiday unfolded pretty quietly. Malcolm and I did a few things around the house over the course of the week. We started by dismantling and moving of all furniture from the attic room which he was using as a bedroom, and I used some reclaimed pallet hardwood and thick plastic sheets that I reclaimed from IKEA packing material to construct a sort of "airlock" that will, I hope, keep most of the dust from falling down the stairwell into the living areas of the house while the demolition, replacement and insulation of our attic goes on. Malcolm and I put up a scaffold ladder and had a look at the ceilings that are currently in place over the stairwell and his attic room; there isn't very much material there to remove, and the demolition shouldn't be terribly difficult, I don't think.
Hallowe'en night we had a nice raclette dinner with Ben and Sophie. They both commented to me later that Malcolm seems much calmer and happier than he was last spring and summer; they have the idea that he's feeling a good sense of accomplishment in his work at the lutherie school. I had a chance to talk to him about it during the week; he says that he is very happy with the atmosphere of his school, of his teachers, and with the work itself. He is now one of only six students in the first year of guitar-making, and he is the easily furthest along in his first classical guitar project, and so is spending some time with the second-year students, as well; he says that none of them were as far ahead with their guitar-building projects at the same time last year, so I think this makes him proud.
Malcolm's guitar top with sound-hole rosette inlay, cut to shape
One advantage that he has is exemption from the academic subjects, having completed his secondary school diploma already. Unlike some students who would use that extra time for entertaining themselves he usually goes into the shop and takes advantage of the access to the tools and machinery to move ahead on his work.
Thursday we had a plumber come in and do some repairs and consultation on our hot water boiler in the bathroom. It seems to have a regulatory problem, so that the thermostat doesn't shut off the gas flame after the hot water tap is turned off. It is this that led to the fracturing of the cold water pipe, because of back-pressure from the boiler, and other problems like hot water bleeding back into the cold water feed. I managed to replace the shutoff valves and flexible cold water feed myself without any leaks, but we have to be careful with the boiler; we light it each time we want to use the bath, and then shut it off afterwards. I hesitate to sink a lot of money into it as it is an older non-compliant model, and we plan to take it out any day now anyway. But we are still waiting for our plumber/furnace/bath installed to come back with his estimate for the new bathroom installation...
Speaking of waiting for workers, I am astonished at how poor workers are at communicating with clients in this country. My plumber/furnace guy was very good to us in Boitsfort but we have been waiting since August for him to give us an estimate without any news. I have tried to get other furnace/plumber installers to come but no one answers their phones!
We had similar experiences with shipping containers: Bryan and I purchased about 30 m3 of firewood for a very low price; after multiple telephone calls and text messages and emails, and two verbal
conversations on the phone, and assurances that he would go and drop off a container to transport the firewood, Fred at FS containers stood us up for the second Saturday in a row. As well, I contacted another construction/shipping company just up the road from me to rent a container for the building refuse that will need disposal after the roof work on our house. They encouragingly responded within minutes, and agreed to come and inspect the driveway on Saturday to see what size container could be placed there. However I was here the whole day, and saw no sign of them! Did they come and measure? Who knows?
My birthday was on Friday, and as it was just the two of us here we had a pretty quiet day. In the afternoon we cleaned out the coal room, located underneath the front step: it has a "window" which communicates with a grate on the front walkway that was used for the coal deliveries back when there was a coal stove in each room. I ran into the former owner of the house this weekend; she remembers when central heating was installed in 1972. That means that the coal that we shovelled out of there today - 8-10 buckets worth - hasn't been touched in 45 years. We also were excited to find some old newspapers used to stop up some holes: this Wavre Local Edition shown here dates from May 21st, 1954, and has advertisements for "Singin' in the Rain" and "The Merry Widow" at the local cinema, as well as a great Vespa ad that proclaims that "after eight years of experience, and 1,000,000 customers, choose Vespa!".
fire outside with a nice martini and a cigar
birthday dinner
Kiki: "I can has Sachertorte?"
Picking up Duncan on Saturday and Maggie on Sunday mornings went pretty well; on the weekend the drive from Wavre to Zaventem is less than half an hour. As well on Sunday morning Maggie and I drove the 6km to Louvain-la-Neuve to pick up Nancy Hunt, her cousin, and we had a nice brunch together in our new house.
Nancy visits
Nancy is in Brussels delivering a lecture series on social anthropology of the Congo at the University, and so we were happy to have the first family visitor in our new place! She will be back and forth quite a bit over the next year, so we hope to see her again, and when the attic rooms are completed it will be our pleasure to have her as a guest.
Sunday afternoon we had a nice big dinner with the beef curry that I had made a couple of days earlier. It was great to have everyone back in the house again; Malcolm's Monday classes don't start until the afternoon, so he finds it easiest to take the train from Wavre on Monday mornings, while Maggie and Duncan do their usual commute. In the evening after dinner we piled into the car and drove a short distance to Leuven to see Bill Frisell play with three other musicians on violin, viola, and 'cello. It was a really nice concert, about 90 minutes long, and they interpreted several popular songs, including Buffalo Springfield's "Stop, Children; What's That Sound?" and Bert Bacharach's "What the World Needs Now" as well as many more experimental jazzy numbers that we hadn't heard before. It was great to see him again; the last time Maggie and I saw him play was at the Phoenix on Sherbourne in Toronto, back in 2004.
On Monday I was invited by Ben to go into Brussels to work on my guitar, so I drove Maggie to work, had a brief doctor's appointment, and then drove into town. It took a little extra work yesterday to finish off all the details, but I'm happy to say that the project that started on April 3rd with shopping for maple for the necks finally ended yesterday, November 7th. I'm really happy with the result: a heavily customised "Zadowcaster", based on Leo Fender's 1950 Broadcaster, the first commercially produced solid-body electric guitar.
There were much easier routes to building a guitar, had I stuck with more standard specifications, but I had a very specific vision. The silver 1920s style Oahu lap-steel pickup (inspired by Ry Cooder's favourite pickup, used on his two customised Fender Stratocasters) gives a shimmery bell-like tone that breaks up progressively if you attack the strings more aggressively with your fingers, while the cream P-90 pickup in the middle position with large pole magnets provides a deeper, rounder complementary tone than the usual Fender lipstick pickup, but still rocks very hard. The unorthodox pickup size and placement meant that I needed to buy a different pickguard and rout out the pickup placement myself. I couldn't order a pre-made fingerboard and neck as I wanted one that is flat like a classical guitar (not radiused) and wanted an unusually wide string-spacing for a solid-body electric; it's the same as my 1935 Silverbody M-14 Regal Dobro, so required planing and shaping and cutting, which added more time to the project. Here are some photos of the finished product!
reinstalling the tuning machines after final lacquering of the headstock
stringing up
checking string height
filing the nut to accommodate the strings
adjusting the bridge pickup
ready to go
test drive at home
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