Today, at the end of the day, Juniper and I took a walk to what Juniper calls "the big job site." I answered all her questions as best I could ("Why?" is a popular one these days) and when it was time to leave promised we would come again soon. It was a great end to a good day's work!
With the hull of the ship finished the push is on to complete the rest of the Avellana. We've nearly completed the steel frame on the bulk of the North Star's nautical bedroom. It won't be too long before it gets its coat on concrete!
The hull of the Avellana is painted and ready to be installed! Once the inn's first set of walls are poured and the forms are stripped she will be hoisted into the air. In the mean time, she sits waiting patiently.
When people ask what we are building next door, we tell them it's something that will make our old house disappear. They think we are joking because the house is a bit of a landmark, but the Hazelnut Inn will handily steal the show with it's much fancier architecture!
Today, the carpenters began tipping up the forms for the giant firewall which will run along our shared property line. Our house literaly disappeared (from certain angles)! This is only the first story of the wall which will go up two and a half times this distance in places. Once the concrete is poured the real interesting work will begin. This is going to be a whole lot of fun!
The windows of the Hazelnut Inn's suites are not square but irregular, with some rounded edges. These shapes sometimes give carpenters pause, but for us they are simply fun.
We carefully designed the shapes of the windows in our routing software. These computer files were passed on to the window manufacturer to ensure they accurately build the windows.
To create the non-traditional spaces in the concrete walls for the doors and windows we needed to build some special forms called "bucks." These will be placed in-between the concrete forms and are locked into the concrete as it is poured. We will fasten in the windows to the bucks once the concrete is dry and the rest of the forms are stripped off.
We used those same computer files to route the plywood 'shapes' around which we built the bucks. The curved sections were fabricated by laminating six layers of half-inch treated plywood. Once the walls are poured we will remove the plywood 'shapes' and the windows will take their place.
Work is progressing quickly on the Hazelnut Inn work site! Today our task was to build the final concrete block wall. It was a tricky one as it is curved but after a week of laying hundreds of blocks, we are getting very fast. The day seemed to fly by and before we knew it we were done!
