There was no post yesterday because we were giving a UCI dinner party in Irvine and weren’t out here late enough to take end-of-day pictures, but we also didn’t have time to write anything.
Picture 1
Picture 2
In the previous days’ photos, the top of the garage was just metal. Today it has a layer of phenolic plywood on the surfaces that will get concrete poured on top. This is a 12-ply plywood made up of maple and phenolic film on the outside surfaces, to provide a smooth finish to the concrete. They have still not finished the back triangle corner because it turns out that the company supplying the scaffolding forgot to send the rails for those sections (along with forgetting the prop heads — remember those? — one wonders how this company makes money). Those pieces are supposed to come tomorrow. Then they too will get this phenolic plywood on them.
The guys had to spend a lot of time today wrenching the wood out of the keys (concrete slots that lock the upper level of concrete into the, now hard, lower level). It was time-consuming because the wood had swollen with the rain and had to be pried out of the concrete trenches with a prybar. The keys are where the structural steel will fit that provides the structure for the overhangs–in one case the apartment deck and the second case part of the apartment, itself. It is now clear that the Chinese Elm tree just to the south of the apartment will have to go. Picture 2 shows how close the front of the apartment is to the tree. It is also the tree that we have been growing our passion fruit vine on. Whether we’ll be able to transplant it remains to be seen.
Picture 3
Picture 3 shows the area behind the garage where other guys were using the backhoe and a jackhammer to clean up the space for the retaining wall that separates the deck (and the space underneath it where the storage bladder for rainwater will go) and one wall of the house. They started building the rebar rack for this wall and the floor for the water storage bladder under the deck. The space between this wall and the back garage wall, which you can see below, is for our 9000 gallon rainwater bladder.