Week 152 (One Step Back)

Sometimes, in order to make progress, one must take a step backward.  Or three.  This past week was mostly one of remediation.

First up was the reconstruction of one of the soffits in the Music Room. If you look very, very closely at this image, you might see the problem (hint, its not lens distortion–the mortar joints are straight and true):

If not, here’s a clue:

The blue chalk line shows the 3/4″ sag that developed across the 16′ span across the Control Room window:

The sub-fascia was straightened out with a very strong steel plate.  Here you can see the many bolts binding the wood to the steel:

Notice how incredibly straight it now looks compared to the first image!

Another problem that’s been holding us up is a 4″ pipe that runs between the two buildings.  It fills with water every time we get a heavy rain.  What we need to fill it with is wires, many of which have no defined OSP (out-side plant) equivalent.  Thus, we need a water-tight pipe.  After spending weeks looking at how we could squeeze the wires we need to squeeze into a series of smaller conduits, we bit the bullet and began the process of re-lining the pipe.  Here’s the machine that’s going to be on the entry side of the pipe-lining process:

And here’s our defense against the splatter that’s sure to come out the other end:

Yuck.

Inside the Music Room, the carpenters are doing detail work between the floor and the door thresholds.  If they do their job perfectly, you won’t even know they’ve done it, so no sense in posting photos.

This week it’s way to cold to pour and color concrete, so the progress on the West Patio has been on hold.

Other problems with glass, paint, stain, etc., are all being worked on.

The wiring progress is now more visible by the scrap that’s generated than by the terminations we’ve completed:

Finally, in a scheduling meeting this past week, we realize that the end of the year is not within our reach, so we’re resetting the clock.  Right now the conservative estimate is that we’ll be up and running in March in the Main studio, and perhaps April in the Annex.

With this reset, we’re looking at about 10 working weeks to open (not including the last two weeks of December), so we can take stock of where we were 10 weeks ago to see whether we really are half-way to the goal-line.  Back then, this is what our Music Room floor looked like:

And now:

All in all, no great completion victories to report, but a strategic repositioning so that when the weather (and our luck) turns, we’ll be ready to race ahead once more.  In the mean time, we are being patient, prudent, and ensuring that we finish strong, maintaining the same high standards with which we started this project.