February 2022

January !3, Marcia's birthday. Pat picked me up that morning and we drove out to The Creeks, an upscale subdivision in southeast Regina. The house was what they call a walkout basement, they have to move a lot of dirt to produce walkout basements in the city of Regina, they had done it for this one. That's where we would start, 1300 square feet of glued down engineered hardwood. It took us the largest portion of the day to prepare the floor but we were able to get enough hardwood done to give us a good start the next morning. We hadn't worked since June of 21 so both of us had muscles complaining, something to do with lactic acid buildup. He blamed me, said I should have said "no", I blamed him, said he shouldn't have asked me. My knees were so sore I didn't even think about my muscles. I have great knee pads but I had crawled around the floor so much that first day my jeans had rubbed a rug burn onto my knees. A little bit of lotion and some knee wraps prepared me for the second day and then I'd have the weekend to recover. There is so much laughter at Tony's Sunday morning it's like a dose of medication so I was ready for Monday. It took us a few more days to finish the basement and a couple more to install the stairs to the main floor. Once I've done my initial measurements for the stairs I'm off my knees, I do all the cutting and Pat does the installation. Another dose of medication at Tony's and I'm ready for the next week. We had another 1300 feet to do on the main. This was nailed down, so different muscles up here. We are one of the final trades so the builder starts getting excited and tries to hurry the finish and you get trades trying to work around each other which actually slows things down. Then you have the tourists the sales people bring in to see the house before it's actually even finished. They have little strategies where they'll stand in front of the saws so you can't use them, my mask used to discourage them but everyone wears a mask now so they think the cloth ones protect them from the construction dust as well as mine does. I do have a few strategies of my own, I can nail enough that the compressor recycles often and our undercut saw for cutting jambs and casings is quite loud. They might wear masks but they don't wear ear plugs. Pat asks, "Why do you do that?" I say "if they want to talk sales they can do it outside" He says, "it's forty below outside," I say, "ok , then they can do it in the garage, I want to get done, we're retiring after this one." He says, "Ok, I'll start the vacuum". So on Friday, January 28 around 10:30 I hung up my tools for good, well, that's not exactly true, they're in a box under my basement stairs. Now I'm retired, again.

Loved