Dust About To Rise Again

Writing Suffering


Sorry about the light posting recently, but I'm up to my eyeballs in CAD work again, and making decisions related to spending another three or four thousand dollars on the materials and services for the Duplex construction project is taking up a good deal of time & energy.

Today was a design and planning day spent hiding inside in front of the computer, leering at the swimming pool but refusing to endure the heat in the process of walking over and sitting down outside. Our heat index was near 110 by mid afternoon.

My Saturday meeting with the real estate guy confirmed a new hunch I had that I was over-doing things by going to the trouble to make the four foot addition on the rear of the building in order to increase the size of the two rear bedrooms.

As things currently stand on the floor plan, my buyers or their new tenants will just have to make do with queen sized beds and keep their tuxedos and twenty extra Gucci suits in storage because the small existing closets in the existing 10 x 12 foot bedrooms are staying as they are.

I'm still blowing out half of the concrete block front wall to accommodate increasing the size of the living/dining area however, so tomorrow we're building the form work needed to thicken half of the 6' wide front porch slab by 2".

That means that I need so little concrete (about 1/2 a cubic yard), that the concrete companies won't deliver for me, so I'm going to have the thrill of renting a portable cement mixer and tossing around a bakers dozen bags of sackrete on Thursday.

I'm also having the first of two 10 cubic yard dumpsters delivered tomorrow morning and loading up all of the lumber and concrete blocks that we've thus far removed from the building in our earlier efforts. I can't allow the dumpster to sit around very long or the locals will fill it with dirty diapers, watermelon rines, and chicken bones and I'll get a fine for violating the "construction debris only" policy that my dump fee pricing is based on.

My earlier reference to "we" and "our" includes my new man Friday (actually James), the homeless guy, that I've adopted as my assistant and who's been showing up pretty regularly to work for three or four hours each session at $10 per hour. If he keeps his shoulder to the grindstone and his nose clean I just may let him become an unofficial resident for a short time for security purposes and my own convenience.

I still have to think about that option however. It's just hard to send him off each day back to the streets and the shelters because he has a great attitude and he works like a slave (no insult intended) and I could really rest easier when I start having to leave expensive things laying around in that building in that neighborhood overnight or over the weekend unattended.

Thus far I've had to unload and load all of my power tools and hand tools from the Suburban into the building on EACH AND EVERY VISIT. The only things I leave lying around is stuff like screws, nails, my shop vac, a couple of ladders, and safety gear like glasses and boxes of ear plugs.

I figure that some guy seen clomping down the road dragging a red Craftsman shopvac by the power cord, toting an orange 12' fiberglass stepladder on one arm, wearing blue framed safety goggles, a stack of paper respirator masks, and pink foam ear plugs will attract enough attention to at least make the newspaper if not awaken the local authorities from their slovenly slumber.

Of course someone could back a pickup truck up into my driveway and just break in and haul the supplies away like they did my kitchen sink a few years ago, but so far the omnipresent floodlights I installed on the front of the building have kept the indigenous kleptomaniacs away.

Any way, this week should see the final framing and floor plan take shape so I can move on to electrical, plumbing, and installing the new metal roofing panels over the old roof.

I want this thing completed and on the market by September 1st, and I'm not getting any younger in the process so I press onward in the near 100 degree F heat.

I think I'll go buy some stock in Gatoraide while I'm at it...

I'm their best customer right now.