January 23, 2008—Work goes on despite the rain and cold . . .

Jim and I spent Tuesday night at the cottage; and it was a good thing, because I had back-to-back meetings scheduled for the whole day. It was freezing cold, but I was on the job at 7 am sharp, for once. Right about 7, the trucks started rolling in, first the framers, then Kai, then the masons.

Not long after the masons arrived, a big truck pulled in with the building supplies for the fireplace, which you can see sitting unloaded in front of the library, while Ginger checks them out.

The driver had the weirdest, little, 3-wheeled fork-lift that I have ever seen, but he said it was very strong for unloading pallets of brick and loads of sand.
You need concrete block, fire brick . . .
. . . mortar and sand and a few more things to build a fireplace.
After off-loading all of the above, the truck took off down the hill.

Here are the masons, Kevin and Kevin carrying rebar in for the masonry.

Kai says he kids them by saying that they can never remember each other’s name.

Meanwhile, Thomas and his brother started framing the range hood. We are building in our range hood rather than getting an expensive stainless one. The guts will be the same as the fancy ones, but ours will be plastered on the outside with wooden corbels “holding” it up. The quotes are because the corbels will be ornamental and just appear to be supporting it.

Meanwhile, Kai and Kevin laid out the fireplace on the floor. We had discovered that due to my poor communication to Abe, the drawing for the fireplace was incorrect. I explained to the masons what I wanted and they seemed to think it was no problem, so we decided to just work from the dimensions of the drawing but make the change on the fly.

What I want is a kiva style fireplace, which is sort of beehive shaped. Abe and I had discussed flattening it because we thought it would save money, but then I designed a more conventional fireplace to use as the flat version and went back to the beehive kiva, but forgot to mention this to Abe. The masons didn’t think flat would be cheaper, so we went back to the beehive kiva-style fireplace.

It was terribly cold. Jim and I had arrived after dark the previous night, but now saw that there was snow on near-by hills. It stayed frigid the whole day, with all of us shivering in our warmest coats.

We had our contractor/client meeting on site and were mighty glad of our cozy, warm cottage to sit in. We started and ended it early so we could meet with Todd, Abe and the electrician for the electrical walk-through at noon.

Over the weekend, between rain storms, my assistant had worked on raising the wall behind the cottage—and just in time, too. I was so relieved to arrive and see that done, because it meant that even if the slump at the corner got worse from more rain, it would be contained behind the wall.
I took this picture to show how soggy the driveway got. It is still hard because of the all the good base in it, but is wet as wet can be. The previous night, the temp had been down to 36° and if it had frozen, what an ice rink that would be.
The deck for the bathtub got installed. Our tub will be dropped into this deck and surrounded by tile.
For more from a busy, cold Wednesday, click here  
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