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When life gives you lemons...
If I'm going to blog steadily for the next several weeks I'm going to have to use the truck load of lemons getting dumped on me. Yes, our seismic retrofit has resumed.At 8am I heard someone out in front of the building and went out to find the electrician, who wasn't aware that they were starting work at 9am today. He left. By 9am a huge truck with scaffolding was blocking the end of our little street. This morning was chosen by the Fates for the building next door to put up scaffolding on the sidewalk in front of their building. There are large trees (now I know why they were recently trimmed) and the slope is steep making throwing up scaffolding a challenging endeavor. Normally these guys can have three or four floors of scaffolding up in no time, but not for this building.
As I was noticing how blocked the alley was and finding out that they expected to be there for hours, I noticed the porta-potty delivery truck passing. I tried to flag him down but he did a quick tour of the neighborhood instead. He pulled in about as illegally as is possible and I helped him unload the porta-potty. Then he noticed that he had pulled off the wrong one, so I helped him re-load that one and pull off the right one. We couldn't get it past the big truck, so we staged it on the sidewalk in front of the corner store until the truck moved. Next the contractor trucks started arriving. We found places for several of them to park on the street and I then let them into the building to start planning Phase 2.
We toured the lower part of the building, marking walls for demolition, ripping out drywall they put up just last month to see how they were going to work around all the water and gas pipes and electrical conduits. A plan was slowly developed as the electrician, plumber, and project manager ran through the options. A major question remains for how to deal with the kitchen wall that would be made too thick for the refrigerator to go back in, if they did it the easy way. I'm waiting to hear back from the unit owner about how he wants them to proceed.
When I left, the scaffolding guys were still struggling with the slope and the trees.
I never got to the gym. I took a bunch of pictures and sent bunch of semi-urgent emails. Why did I think this Phase would be easier than the last?
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