Friday, October 05, 2007

OK, so this blog update is obviously ridiculously overdue. I think I've set a new record for time intervals between posts. The good news, however, is that I have a lot of pictures and news and so this update will be followed quickly by at least one or two more.


On the very first day of assembling the shop frame (which was sometime back in June!!) one of my forklifts suffered catastrophic engine damage. Great beginning! So we ended up having to rent a scissor lift, which was actually a blessing as it made the job much easier. These two pictures were taken when the shop frame was nearing completion. With the use of the scissor lift and Otis, my trusty forklift (the one which didn't break) Christina and I assembled the whole frame in 5 days.



The next step was to put up the insulation and exterior wall panels. This is actually quite a pain in the ass, as the insulation has to be hung on the side of the building, and then the panel has to be quickly put up over it and screwed into the frame, sandwiching the insulation. Any significant wind or rain stops you dead in your tracks. Also, this job requires a minimum of three people, so our friend Cedar, among others, helped us out during this phase.

The Northern edge of our property is marked by an arroyo, or dry stream-bed. One day in July, an unusually heavy mid-afternoon rain turned that stream-bed into something more like a raging river. I think this is what "flash flood" means!

This was the scene on that day in the area between my storage containers. My storage containers are where I have stored pretty much everything I own. The water level rose to the point where I had 5 inches of standing water in each of my containers. I really haven't been able to get very far back into them yet, so I don't really know how much of my personal belongings were damaged, but I know it was a lot. Several of my machine tools have pretty aggressive rust on them. It wasn't much compared to New Orleans, but it was a bit of a personal disaster nonetheless.

At least Sprocket had a good time.

Here is the shop almost done, with the roof on and the windows framed out. You can see that our "commute" from the house definitely won't be causing any road rage!


We finished the shop in the last week of August, and here it is! The site of much future productivity and art creation! After getting the final inspection, we quickly moved Christina's tools in so that she could teach a Women's Welding Workshop in the first week of September. And pretty much as soon as that was done, I jumped on a plane bound for Amsterdam, where I spent three weeks building...... Ha!, you'll just have to wait for the next blog entry!

Stay Tuned!