Home repair

I don't know anything about home repair. It's one of those things, that if your lucky, your dad will teach you. My father wasn't so lucky as he grew up in trying times, left home at an early age, and got lucky by making his way to Canada to start a new life.

Well my dad isn't really a handy guy. And neither am I. My father like my grandfather were both readers. Like father like son, I'm a reader too preferring theory over practice, concepts over tools.

On Victoria Day (May 18, 2009), my mom called me down to help outside on the walkway leading to my backyard. My mom and my neighbour have been talking about getting rid of a fence that separated our 2 yards. The fence was put up like 10 years ago. Since then the fence has been warped due to the build up of dirt/sand/gravel on my neighbours side placing alot of pressure on the fence. On Monday I helped remove the planks of the destroyed wooden fence into a van to be disposed of. Byron, a neighbourhood handyman, was hired to do the work. I helped lighten the load.

It was pretty cool. It wasn't just cleaning up the bits. They also wanted to repair the walkway leading to our backyard. I've laid paving stones at the tennis club before (a part-time job that I had throughout my high-school and University days), but I never witnessed destroying something so close to a building. The walkway was made of concrete not slabs of paving stones. It was 4 inches thick and it was almost a single piece. Byron bashed away at it for a good hour (on different sections of the walkway). It was fascinating watching him break it apart because as he was striking the concrete with his sledgehammer (5 lbs.) you could see the house shake!!
It gave me a feeling that my life wasn't really that secure and that one good blow could blow my house down (both literally and figuratively). I realized I need to learn some of these things.



The walkway was dug up from the foreground all the way to the recycle bin (background). It was really falling apart (the walkway) at the foot of this picture.

The backyard is full of piles of rubble.

It was a good time to clean up this mess. When I was a kid the side of our neighbours house (pink siding) was not there. Our neighbour was a Portuguese couple that kept a pigeon coop above a shed. We could hear the cooing of the pigeons every morning as they were being fed. We had a metal fence where pink siding sits now. On both sides of the walkway my mom used to grow vegetables like 冬瓜 and 葱. Our neighbourhood is a nice place to live (if you can afford it).
Posted by Den - 張恩華 at 6:48 PM