This weekly update brings good news (the arrival of the 4″ polished blocks) and bad news (the senseless shredding of an important access path).
Earlier this week we were innundated by a spontaneous tropical formation that did not quite warrant a name, but it did a decent job of saturating some already saturated earth. For some as-yet undetermined reason, the delivery people though it would be a good idea to sneak in 7 pallets of 4″ polished stretcher blocks despite the fact that the ground could not hold the weight of their truck tires. The result is that not only did they fail to deliver the blocks where they were supposed to (into row 3 of the block library), but they absolutely ruined the path that all future deliveries will have to traverse. This will complicated the delivery of the remaining 100 pallets. Not very smart!
Adding insult to injury, they sprayed an open pallet of blocks with mud, which may compromise the visual integrity of the blocks for use inside the building. I guess we’ll now be using those blocks to build our sample panel. Yuck!
Looking on the brighter side of things, there’s been more progress on the technical infrastructure. We’re very close to having a new electrical plan, and we’ve ordered more material in anticipation of getting that plan approved:
We also did some careful evaluation of our delivered block quality. We opened up a pallet of block, graded the blocks Green (visually perfect), Yellow (minor visual impact), and Red (visual damage that must be hidden), and found that we had about 45% Green, 45% Yellow, and 10% Red. Assuming that this one random pallet is representative of other pallets (an assumption we’ll be checking as we build), we’re going to use the Green blocks for the interior, the Yellow blocks for the exterior, and the Red blocks for parts of the structure that are hidden (behind soffits, walls, etc). This simplified strategy will minimize the amount of block handling we have to do, which will in turn minimize the total damage we do to the blocks as we move them from pallet to their final location in construction.
