The million dollar view...

Over the past few days, the third floor of the house has been built, well, I should say was being built. Yes, was being built and when it was, we got the awesome surprise to discover that from that floor, we are the proud owners of the million dollar view. 

The funny thing is, when you build a house in a rather crowded neighborhood, that you really don't know what you are going to get in terms of view. Our house is at the maximum height allowed by the City by-laws (12 m) but until we built the third floor, we didn't even think about what we were going to see from up there.  It turns out that we have a completely unobstructed view of the entire city, including a somewhat cheesy castle that was built a century ago I believe. The castle itself is not really my cup of tea in terms of design but mixed in with the skyscrapers and city lights, it creates a pretty radical view I must admit. That's always nice to find out that kind of thing. Especially when it comes as a total surprise. In order to benefit from this view, we have made a couple of changes to the third floor, it is going to look amazing when finished... and talking about that, we have had pretty awful weather over the past few days. 

A cold front has been hanging over our heads, still is and will be until at least Friday. This cold front (not to mention the pretty intense snowfall that has come along with it) is a major inconvenience because it is too cold to finish framing. The team of VERY HARDCORE Russians framers have stopped working for now. And these guys are though as nail, they worked last week, when it was -7/8. It was sunny but quite cold, they were still out there putting the walls up. I asked them if they were cold and they said "no, it is not - 20 yet, this is noting". Right, yes, it is nothing, thought I, standing there freezing my ass. Anyhow, yesterday, it must have been -13, -20 with windchill and they didn't show. Of course, I am not going to blame them. Frankly, there is no way I would be able to work on a job site with these polar temperatures. Forget it! However, I would love for this cold front to move out of the way so the workers can come back and finish the third floor AND put the roof on so we can close the house before Xmas, as it was planned. I guess I have to keep on crossing my fingers and hope for warmer - ahem, let's no kid ourselves- less cold weather.