House - August 19th

With Mom in Maine, and with everyone else dieing from curiousity about the progress on the house, I am adding new pictures.

To start off, we have a crew of framers, in addition to our regular construction crew, helping to speed the framing along. The boss of these framers is Luke, with the cast below left. He can do more work with one good arm than I can do with two.

He has several assistants, all from South of the border. In the shot below right are two of them. The one with the hat speaks excellent English and acts very cool, very in control. The other one speaks no English at all but has a tremendous big smile that he is always sharing.

These next photos show some of the progress these framers have made. They have been working on the upper floor. The shot below on the left shows the pantry, laundry room, and bathroom, which are now all framed in. Note the large space on the far left where the doors leading from the kitchen out onto the back balcony will be.

The kitchen framing was originally done in 2x4s, but should have been 2x6s. So the framers have added a 2 inch strip, called a furring, to each of the 2x4s. You can see this extra strip in the shot on the right below.

Our construction crew was working downstairs, in the shade. The task for the day was removing the cement column separating the room with the conversation pit from the media room, and then replacing it with a large beam. On the left Russ, our contractor, and John, his assistant, have knocked out the concrete column and are removing it.

The next task was to take out the existing beam, because it wasn't strong enough to hold the weight above it without the column. In the upper right John is using a sawzall to cut away the old beam.

The new beam weighed about 500 pounds. So Russ used a lifter, at left, to put the new beam into place. I was a little worried that it wouldn't fit but it was like a hand in a glove. These guys really know what they are doing.

Here is the new beam, exactly in the center of the picture at right. It is horizontal in the picture and is about eight feet off of the floor. It is about 14 inches tall and 4 inches thick.

While all this was going on I was doing demo. Here is the fruit of my labor. What used to be a downstairs fireplace is a pile of bricks. I was exhausted when I was done and was very glad to see that Tyler, the third member of our construction crew, took it upon himself to move all this debris out to the dumpster by himself.

Last, the house at the end of the day. It is hard to see from here but the walls surrounding the kitchen are almost all in place. That space is enormous and very high. The peak of the kitchen ceiling will be a foot or so higher than the height of the front window.







So there you go. The latest from Lares Way. I love and miss you all.

Dad