Concrete (hopefully this is the last post about concrete for quite a while), back door view, and fire

It has been 3-4 weeks since we poured this back patio:


This is at the rear of the building, a level up from the parking lot.
The concrete truck parked up in the alley and we carried the cement down in 5 gallon buckets. There were four of us (we could have used another person or two) and it was hard, sweaty work. This is, again, water control. And it's a nice shady resting spot, too, that will be the beginning of the hillside seating area.

See the small concrete pad here?


That's for the air conditioner:

It sure feel nice inside!

Walking over to the other corner of the building, still standing on the concrete, this is the view:


The roof is actually red now, and I'll get those pictures up soon, but here it's still tar paper.
You can see the door in the back of PC's truck. In the previous post there was a picture of the door after it was unloaded, so I'm chronologically upside down. Soon I'll post a picture of the door where it's supposed to be...


Just a few minutes later, the fire trucks screamed through town to put out this fire:


It must have been a huge fire because I could see flames from here!


But the fire department(s) had it under control pretty quickly, because it didn't last long.

Thank goodness.

Busy, busy, busy...

Just because I haven't been keeping up with the blog doesn't mean there's nothing going on. As a matter of fact, there's so much going on, I haven't had time to blog.

There is now a door-shaped hole in the wall.
The entryway roof is tar papered.
The interior floor is scraped down to bare concrete and the tiling has begun.

I'll be posting pictures soon....

Entryway Construction - Part 2

This brick is at least 118 years old:

These bricks are solid and heavy and now they're in a pile in the parking lot.

See?


It's the first layer of bricks in what will be the doorway.




Looking up:


There are rafters since the last time I posted!






I wanted to get a view from the caboose park so you can see our front entry way from there:


Next time I think I'll go even further down the street and snap a few pictures, too.

I'm getting ready to write a post over at the Taylor County West Virginia Blog about the Caboose Park and I'll add a link that hooks in over here (*link added), too. The caboose is a part of the Civil War Discovery Trail.
Here's a link to West Virginia Tourism's Civil War Discovery Trail page. It doesn't even list this as a stop. It does list the Grafton National Cemetery, though.

The 123 - More Pictures & Progress

Looking from the back of the building, that huge rounded clump is the probably-mulberry tree. If you look close, you can just barely see PC's while t-shirt there by the corner of the building.

We had to climb through it (PC threaded the really long extension ladder up through it and using a combination of ladder rungs and limbs, we were able to get on top) to inspect the roof. Let me take a minute to say that the view is SPECTACULAR! (Someday in the next few years there is going to be a deck up there….before I get too off topic, I’ll stop, but I’ll write more about the plans for the third floor and roof later).

Here's a picture of the roof, too:

Look at all that stuff growing up there! The poor old 123 was being attacked from below AND above! I have not been back up there since PC cut it all away from the building (I’m not sure the ladder goes all the way up!) so I don’t have pictures from that high up. You can get a pretty good idea from the backgrounds of the other pictures.

Sadly, just about everything is gone, but it had to be done to prevent further damage to the 123. With building health as the number one priority, however, it will get landscaped again when we start building decks back there. Yet another project to write about….

For those of you who have been reading past posts: The electric had to be remounted onto the back of the 123. The vines and growth –ironically not our jungle, but the neighbor’s overgrowth- had pulled the weatherhead out of the brick and that had to be fixed before they’d turn the electric back on here at the 2nd floor. So, yep, I have electric up here (as you could tell from the scary-no-more refrigerator pic).

More on the 123 later…..