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!

][<en

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