For several weeks the QR has been knee-deep in one sort of wire or another, like a meadow that’s grown well past the capabilities of the average lawnmower. Here’s where we were three weeks ago, with about half of the wiring pulled:
And here’s where we are this week, with a good bit of the wires were dressed and the floor swept clean:
And I do mean clean:
It’s clean up above, too:
Now we just have a few more wires to dress, terminate, and ultimately plug into gear:
There’s work to be done on the other ends of these cables as well. Here’s a “head shot” of Panel 1, which will ultimately be installed in the Music Room:
I think the anodized color of the panel goes quite nicely with the block color. BTW, don’t worry about the upside-down XLR connectors in Lines 2 and 3…we’ll turn those around before we install it.
While all this wiring was going on, a new crew arrived to cut dados into several of the door frames of the Music Room. A dado is a term than comes from joinery, but in this case we’re cutting into architectural blocks:
The dimensions of the dado are precisely those of a treated 2×6 framing member that will be installed so that our IAC door frame will have something to grab onto. By insetting these framing members, we ensure that we’ll have enough framing width to meet ADA compliance despite the 5″ stiles of our STC 51 doors. Here’s a view of the opposite dado from the opposite side:
You can see that this creates a lot of rubble and dust (and, I presume, noise).
Here’s a dado in one of the Loggia/Music Room door frames:
Moving around to the outside, the drains for the North Patio have been installed. Here you can see that the drainage elements get progressively deeper from South to North (right to left):
and deeper still as it continues toward the Northeast catch basin drain:
Condenser units for the Music Room also showed up this week:
They came out of their boxes…
…and were shortly installed thereafter.
Another goody installed this week is the isolation transformer for our clean/balanced power:
The bare copper wire you see behind the heavy-duty electrical cabling is a 4 AWG grounding wire. Here’s a detail of the massive copper bus bar:
Speaking of heavy-duty electrical work, the MDP in the Annex is now a work of art:
Here’s a detail revealing the 300A switch when the red safety plate (above) is flipped down (below):
The masons have been hard at work, not only installing the drains, but also cutting and placing the top course of blocks for the slab that will wrap around the building and expand into the patio areas:
And from another perspective:
It’s a lot of cuts into a lot of blocks:
A similar pile of sheetrock tells the story of progress in the Annex:
The first layer is in:
And then another. And then it’s time for the last layer, which gets nearly a gallon of Green Glue for every full board:
Finally, just a note about the care with which our team works on the building. As they were putting up sheetrock in the Annex hallway, they discovered a birds nest with not-yet-fledged chicks living in the soffit. They cut a hole to allow the parent birds continued access to the chicks:
Based on the progress they’ve been observing, it looks like the chicks will be ready to fly away on their own in another few days. Nice!
And so I will close this posting with another record of the flowers that bloom on our trumpet vine, just one of the beauties of our wonderful environment:
