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So, at least we’re getting a double use out of the skating rink. It’s now a wading pool as well.

Who would possibly have believed that we’d have -35C and rain within weeks of each other, in Winnipeg in February? It got above freezing in January too, then back down to -30C. The potholes are going to be monstrous come spring.

The street out front of our house is a skating rink. The slick ice is wet, so the almost unnoticeable depression at the corner has become a car trap. A large moving van got stuck spinning its wheels this morning and had to be pulled out, and we’ve watched two more cars sit on a seemingly flat surface completely unable to move.

I have a bunch of errands to run, but I don’t think anyone is going anywhere for a few days until everything freezes and the sander truck comes by.

Nice for the foundation too:

Two years ago I put a skating rink in our backyard and it didn’t go so well. This year I decided to follow my own advice, use a plastic liner and try again.

The plan: Use 2×6′s to make a frame. Wait for cold weather. Lay the plastic liner in the frame and fill it up. Skate.

The execution:

In October, I laid out the 2×6′s in the size I wanted and used 1×2 stakes to hold them up. Here’s the helpful assistant screwing the 2×6′s to the stakes:

Then we waited for cold weather. Being in Manitoba meant that this wasn’t a long wait.

I waited too long to make the plastic liner outdoors, so I laid it out in the basement. The plastic I got was only 48 inches wide, so I had to put 5 strips of it together to make the liner wide enough. I overlapped the pieces 12 inches, put a bead of acoustic caulk down and taped both sides.

As it turns out, this is a pretty poor way to do it. Cheap duct tape loses adhesion in cold weather. Also, one of the joints I made a different way (before going with the simple overlap method) held a lot of air and floated, making it very hard to cover with water. Luckily it was right along one edge of the rink, so I just piled snow on it and made the ice surface about 20 inches narrower than planned.

When the weather got cold enough I went out to clear the snow from inside the rink, but found that the kids’ games of Fox and Goose had packed the snow into heavy, hard to shovel piles. Hooray for Mr. Doug from down the street who spent a half hour on a -30C on a Sunday morning to help me out!

Once the snow was mostly gone, the rest was stomped smooth and level.

Next came laying out the liner and stapling it around the outside of the boards.

The outside tap will freeze and crack if we use it in the winter, so I hook the hose up to the kitchen tap and run it out the window. I got the adapter to hook the hose the the faucet for $2.49 at the hardware store.

Here is another able assistant holding the hose to start the initial filling.

At this point it becomes a waiting game. The initial fill took about 10 hours. I found that the boards weren’t as level as I thought. The water is within 2 inches of the top of one side and 6 inches from the top at the other. My yard is not level (for drainage purposes) so it took a lot of water to fill one side of the rink deep enough to get water over to the other side.

Even using cold water, filling the rink at night at -30C makes for some neat steam.

In this picture you can see that the far side is full and smooth while this side doesn’t even have any water in it yet. The snow close to the camera is my early attempt to hold the floating liner down, before I gave up on that entirely.

Once the rink was filled, I let it sit for a few days to make sure it was completely solid.

Lessons I learned:

1. Make the boards more level. This will make filling easier.
2. Don’t wait until it’s very cold to fill the rink. At -30C the water freezes before it has a chance to flow nice and level, so there are some ridges in the ice. The perfectionist in me wants to try to create some sort of mini-zamboni to fix it, but even that wouldn’t work at -30, I suspect.
3. Buy a one-piece rink liner rather than piecing plastic together.

The plastic I sealed together has a leak somewhere, because the water seeped out into the surrounding snow before it froze (though MrsPages is confident that the seams didn’t leak but there’s a hole in the plastic somewhere) :

Finally the day came:

And there was much rejoicing.

al⋅ba⋅tross [al-buh-traws, -tros] –noun
1. any of several large, web-footed sea birds of the family Diomedeidae that have the ability to remain aloft for long periods. Compare wandering albatross.
2. a seemingly inescapable moral or emotional burden, as of guilt or responsibility.
3. something burdensome that impedes action or progress.
4. the Pages’ basement.

We’ve lived in this house for 10 years now, and for almost 5 of those years we’ve had an unfinished basement. It’s been in various stages of done-ness. See previous posts showing small progress.

Well, I’ve taken the first two weeks of December as vacation from work (because I’m the only one working the last two) and that makes a grand total of 16 days in a row to work on getting the albatross off my neck.

I’ve made up a to-do list and it’s surprisingly small, though some of the jobs are quite time-intensive (for instance “paint trim” and “install trim”). We have a few other things to do on these two weeks, including a trip to visit Mr. Mike and Mrs. Val at their new house that is VERY FAR AWAY FROM US (I’m not bitter) but I’m going to try to work as many of those days as I can, from waking to sleeping.

It will be nice to have people over. To let kids play in the basement. To sit on the couch and watch a movie. To have all the bookshelves out of the living room. To set up the drumkit and the bass amp and the PA. To get out from under this “Oh, when the basement is done then…” guilt.

I’ve set up my to-do list on twodue.com so you can play along and watch the progress. Actually, it’s so I have some sort of accountability, and I can see the progress, but letting you folks watch is a bonus. The list is viewable here.

I’ll try to capture before, during and after pictures, because we don’t have enough of those for this project house that we bought, and it’s hard to remember how far we’ve come.

I’m nervous, because I think I’ll be discouraged if the majority of this stuff doesn’t get done, but I sure hope to give it my best shot. Ash and Snowy might even come by to do some painting!

Updates as they happen…

Whoohoo! Ceiling in the main area is finished and thanks to Snowy and Ash’s unceasing paintitude, there is primer and a first coat on walls and ceiling! That’s a bigger job than it seems because painting the tongue and groove pine involves a first trip across with a brush painting the grooves, then a trip across with the roller.

The place looks brighter. The ceiling looks higher. I can almost picture moving bookcases and furniture in…. We couldn’t be more thrilled. Six years of waiting and working coming to a head!

MrsPages and the LittlePages are going to be sanding, filling and painting today. (And much of next week, likely)

Here’s the bit of ceiling that I have left to put boards on, at the bottom of the stairs. Hopefully finished today, but the corners and angles make for slow going.

The ceiling is simply Behr Ultra Pure Flat Ceiling White. The walls are a beautiful barely-off-white Behr PPL-50 “Table Linen”. It’s just tinted enough to see a difference when it’s up against the white ceiling and trim. It really warms the place up nicely.