Orgrease Crankbait: Faux Fireplace, Day 3 http://bit.ly/9MEbvi
Hubert Ellis comes over to help.
Most of the work in three days has been to prepare the salvaged historic
materials and in layout.
Due to design issues that I won't explain other than that it would have
been nice if someone had looked at the original brick before framing out
the opening w/ steel stud & sheet rock-- the salvaged brick columns need
to be trimmed in order to fit. Irreversible cuts not for the squeamish.
Initial lines are now set in mud -- they will determine the horizontal
plane of the finished floor installation (wood) and the vertical
plane/placement and elevation of the re-installed historic wooden
interior of the library. The concrete floor itself, as can be expected
is not exactly level, and the need to keep the hearth brick as low as
possible means that they are being set with thin-set. But thin set when
it goes thick does not set very fast and as a result one hearth brick
drives me a bit nuts for several hours.
I anticipate that this project will use 4 different mortars. 1. thin
set, 2. type S masonry, 3. refractory (good for 5,000 degrees F) and 4.
an off-white grout for the finish on hearth and face brick. All of them
mixed in small batches by hand.
In the middle of working on laying out the lines in mud the gas line guy
came around to to put soap on the gas line and check it, like this could
have been done last week, and he kicked one of the bricks, meaning what
had taken an hour already had to be re-done.
Tolerances here are a hair. Carpenters work with materials that tend to
come in relatively straight lines (particularly straighter for finish
carpenters) whereas mason's work with stuff that likes to float in space
-- and brick that will mysteriously move all by itself. I really do not
like when carpenters come in after the fact and say that we masons were
off on our spatial coordinates. We had this little problem w/ the
Bathroom from Hell and I felt like bashing the poor carpenter in the
head w/ my 4' wood level. When we go back on Monday 1st thing is to
double/triple check w/ the carpenter that we got everything in the
right/best spot.
New work allows more free play... the mason's would have built this
fireplace where the brick took them and then the carpenters would have
built TO the masonry and the zone of relationship between the two trades
would have been a question of a space of a foot around the masonry and
not directly an impact on the entire subsequent room. Analogy is a
full-scale model, all the parts of the room have been pre-cut and they
need to fit together back into a new box. The room was removed from the
north side of the building and relocated to the south side of the
building -- so there is really no good reference to the new space and
the recreation is also an act of discovery.
People keep coming along and asking if I build fireplaces now, "No, not
exactly." If there is anything more I can do to confuse the world as to
what it is that I do then please let me know.
My friend Zach Rice showed up on two days. The first visit I was not
sure who he was and I stood there looking at him wondering how many
people can look like Zach Rice (he will come up much later in the Wild
Turkey saga). Mind you, my mind is on bricks-in-space and I had not
expected to see him. We had a nice chat. The next day he showed up w/ a
gaggle of histo presto folks including the LPC staff person that I was
introduced to and I immediately forgot their name (not good politics on
my part). Douglas Schickler showed up in that group and we mutually
stared at each other trying to figure out where we knew each other from.
A fellow in a very hi-class black suit showed up with a posse of women
and they asked questions, turned out he was the general manager of the
boutique hotel chain. He is going to send a photographer around next
week... oh goody! I am coated with mortar dust. I may remember to shave
next week? Leaving house at 6 am and getting home at 8 pm. Later in the
day the project manager saw me sitting on the bags of sand, I was deep
in contemplation of next moves, either that or too tired to make a next
move, but I must have looked idle. He showed me on his iPhone some
really awesome stone/fireplace work of a friend of his Billy Barnes --
check it out -- Barnes Stone Masonry, Inc.| Lord's Creek Lodge
http://bit.ly/cAgVHq I really dig the brick spiral chimneys and the
herringbone fireboxes... awesome!
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