Stilts and crates

Mom! Mom! The crate is here!

The sealift is in! Wahoo!  Even if you are nowhere near the harbour it is obvious.  Everywhere you look you see wood shipping crates sitting in front of people's homes.  People get EVERYTHING shipped via sealift: cars, furniture, beer, noodles, bicycles, rice, cleaning supplies, you name it. I've been told the sealift people just unload the crates next to the beach. A local company often transports each crate to the customer's home address (last name and address are often written on the outside of the crate).  The other option is going down to the beach to do it yourself, which I would imagine is kind of difficult.  I suppose you could open the crate with a crowbar and try to put everything in your vehicle (making multiple trips).  You would just have to cross your fingers that the rest of items in the crate were still there when you came back to reload. After they are emptied the crates are recycled (wood is precious up here where there are no trees). I've even seen a dog-house made from a deconstructed sealift crate.

Lots of groceries in this one?

If you order a LOT of stuff via sealift, you can't just have it sent up in a crate.  You need to purchase a container.  You get the joy of keeping the container, so many homes have shipping containers next to them.  Some are painted to match the house and made into extra storage for skidoos, etc. Some appear have been turned into workshops or even living spaces. Some have obviously just been left to rust.

Common sight: shipping container!

Container painted to match house.

You may have noticed in the pics above that the houses are raised off the ground. All the homes here are built on stilts (or more correctly: piles).  This is because of the permafrost (ground that remains permanently or almost permanently frozen).  Permafrost is what keeps the land (rock) stable.  If the homes were built on top of the rock, the heat from inside the homes would melt the permafrost, causing the ground to shift.  Obviously, you would end up with shifting homes, unstable cracked floors and walls, etc.  This means no house has a basement or even what most of us would think of as a foundation.

These 2 dogs must not get along when left alone.  The
fenced space under the piles doubles as a dog run
for the smaller dog below. (I learned today that this family actually has a
dog-team that has full run of the "basement" space.)

Some houses leave the piles as is (as are?) and use the space under the house to store things like skidoos (that's "snow machines" to my Thunder Bay peeps and "snowmobiles" to my American friends), equipment, shovels, etc. Other homes (like ours) have surrounded the space between the bottom of the house and the ground in thin wooden "skirting". This means we can store things under the home and lock a door to keep belongings relatively safe.

The house next door.  Space under piles is open.

Our house.  Fooled you! Not a foundation!
Thin plywood-like sheeting provides basement-like storage.
Sort of. Only accessible from outside

The photo of the house above has it all: piles, shipping crate, and cargo container!  Iqaluit at its finest.

Next up: This sunshine is just too much!

ATTENTION: Looking for reader feedback.  I have so many flippin' things to post but I don't want to bombard everyone's inboxes.  Anyone have any comments on the rate of posts?  Too many per week? Too few?  Want to know more? I have a traditional Inuit drum concert coming up, pics of the house with ALL OF OUR BOXES in it, photos of the city, the weirdness of shopping in Iqaluit, etc.  The list just keeps going!  If no one steps up to complain/suggest I'll just keep posting 1-2 times per week as per usual.