This past week saw another series of block deliveries, mostly odds-and-ends type blocks, such as this 6″ CBBB Polished 1 Face 1 Bottom block. Another fourteen similarly unique pallets were delivered, and if you were wondering when the amount of extraordinary detail that defines every aspect of this project would begin to weigh on my psyche, it would be about now. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle where you know what it’s supposed to look like in the end, but you cannot start putting it together until all the pieces are delivered, and there are so many pieces that it takes weeks and weeks and weeks for all of them to be delivered.
The good news is that the deliveries should be complete in the next few weeks, and if we every finish putting conduit into the foundation, we can pour the slab and actually begin real construction…
While we await that day, we have begun to anticipate some of the construction challenges we defined long ago in the design. We arranged to get some spare RPG blocks to give the masons a chance to become familiar with both the blocks and our prefered method of building with them. We want the style of the 3/8″ rake to be continued through the RPG blocks, even though it’s not really practical to do so in some places because of the shape of the “B” blocks. Because the RPG molds produce an equal number of A and B blocks, and because we have a number of columns made from only A blocks, we have an excess of B blocks. We arranged to get some spare RPG blocks (manufactured in grayblock) to give the masons some practice. Here is a sample panel they built for our review.
Based on this wall we have a pretty good idea of how we will build the next one, and ultimately the real walls in the actual studio.
Back to the subject of block inventory, here’s the latest row to be filled in:
And with every delivery, the recounts: