Built During The Stampede

Well, happy day after Canada Day! This is kind of like Boxing Day without any great deals at the electronic stores or crappy gifts to return. Luckily, it is the summer and the weather is pretty nice for Calgary. I picked my daughter and her family up at the airport this afternoon on the return from a vacation in Phoenix. It was twenty degrees cooler here than there, but it was still what I call hot. I don't think Arwen will agree with me.

We are fast approaching the rainy season in Calgary. We call it the Calgary Stampede. It is nine or ten days of Wild West fun. The weather is often wet, but most of the city’s population are drunk for the duration, so no problem really. I know at least one guy that takes his holidays during the Stampede and his budget is  $400 per day for partying. I don’t get it! I have never really embraced the whole cowboy thing, but the vast majority does. I can be a drag sometimes. Okay, most of the time. This year I promise that I am gong to have fun and not just fun at other peoples expense.

I spent most of the day doing small home renovation. I tore out the carpet yesterday and today I have been laying laminate flooring. So far there haven’t been any major screw ups to report, just some minor things that no one other than me will notice. Well, Louise will probably notice, but she is my wife and I seldom listen to what she has to say. Ha…ha…just joking honey.


I am one of those guys that long for the good old days when gas was cheap, the music was groundbreaking, I was twenty something and people took pride in their chosen field. I will lament that the kids today don’t seem to have any work ethic to speak of and if it weren’t for texting they wouldn’t get any exercise at all. We actually used to manufacture products in Canada and didn’t send everything to be manufactured in China. Once again, Canadian workers took pride in the work they did and proudly would sign their names to said product. To some extent this is true, the part about the cheap gas and good music. The rest…


During the demo yesterday I had to pull up the carpet and the underlay. Just let me tell you that the underside of the carpet made me want to gag. We have been in this house for over twenty-five years, and I can’t see any of my family making those kinds of stains. It would have had to be the previous owners. I am going to have a talk with the “kids” about why they would use their bedrooms as a toilet. Another day…another day.


I couldn’t help but notice what a shit job the guys that built this house did. I know there are minimum standards and it seems that they did just the minimum. The plasterers failed to clean up the plaster that dropped on the floor, which shows a definite lack of interest in quality workmanship. The job isn’t done until the site is cleaned up. The flooring guys had to be the laziest pricks this side of  “Lazy Town”. You know “Lazy Town”; it is over in “Don’t Give a Fuck “ county.  These guys put the carpet over large blobs of plaster. I had noticed the same thing a while back when I did the living room floor, but I had forgotten and wasn’t writing a blog that helps me vent. How hard is it to scrape and sweep the floor? I know it was someone else’s job, but really? 


Holes were drilled through the floor for cables or maybe it was just over zealous mice. The vents were put in with but one nail to hold them in place and the vent doesn’t even line up with the holes in the floor. I am pretty sure the framers were using “The Force” to take measurements, because there isn’t a square corner in the place. The place is still holding together, but I suspect it is in spite of the builders, not because of them.


I will tell you that the next time I buy a house in Calgary, I am going to check and I won’t buy if it was built during the Stampede.