ddiaz wrote:

> did he include a pantone refernce w/ the photos???
> how the hell can he tell ?

Drew,

I don't know what the hell they looked at... assume it was an electronic
distance shot or whatever sent via reduced-size e-mail -- though likely
something better than a phone picture.

White in this case is white from Home Depot direct off the shelf and
they had mock-ups months and months ago to look at and a proposal in
hand that went direct to the owner (he was there last year himself and
saw the mock-ups and picked what he liked then -- not what I would have
picked) that said in plain English that between the two choices that he
made, one being lime wash and the other being primer, that the primer
would be more durable. Nobody told us different and they had plenty of
opportunity to do so. I avoided the lime wash since this 'is' a pool
house, water & bodies rubbing their wet butts up against the wall. Ouch!
I wrote the GC a 3 page letter yesterday... it helps to wait 24 hours
before responding. The project manager when I told him what was up, he
had not heard it from his office, was driving and says he almost drove
off the road.

If we had ANY clue that they would not want the coating we would have
done the job different. As it is we put more time into fussing with one
aspect than another and if they strip the paint it will require
additional work, let alone might damage what was done. I say that we
have no interest in going in with dental picks and tooth brushes to
remove the paint from the cracks & crevices in the terra cotta block --
been there, done that. We used a latex primer so that we could paint
over freshly pointed joints... the paint will have sucked into the
mortar. If they want a distressed look we can probably do well at it w/
a pressure washer... but there is going to be a hell of a lot of water
put into the building... and all we've heard otherwise for the last week
is that the GC wanted us to move out so that they could install a wide
plank floor.

And if we go to chemical strippers we got to think agout caustic
chemical residue getting into the wood floor and surrounding whatever
they will have built in a hurry then leaching out onto semi-naked bodies
over time in a wet environment. Though we can always blame it on
chlorine in the pool.

Now, though we DID NOT ourselves want to coat the tc block w/ white
primer we did the best damned job of it that we could... the reversed V
joints look really kool, the balance of jumbled block on the tc
block,which was NOT set very neatly to begin with, and the difficulty of
repointing such uneven joints, and the corrugations of the block (mostly
running vertical) provide incredible shadow effects to the otherwise
'white' wall... and the bleed through of color from the variagated
orange industrial tc block beneath lends a quite subtle variation to the
white field. We were bouncing off of the Hamptons white wall aesthetic.
What I don't think that they know is that they got a friggin work of art.

When I mentioned to someone that we were cutting out and repointing
mortar joints their immediate comment of astonishment was that at our
prices they could find 30 masons to do the job. My reply was that of the
30 masons none of them would have a clue what they were being asked to
do. Now I feel like a dumb ass. Possibly we should consider a buckshot
effect at paint removal?

A note: we were asked to do infill of a few openings and I told them
that since they were in a hurry they would have to go with brick. Got
into a whole discussion as to the historical context of industrial tc
block and why it is no longer available. I set brick in the opening
first that would be covered over... I set it and looked at it... it
looked too good. I did another column that would be hidden, and it
looked better at not looking too good. So when I got to the last in-fill
I had what I felt was just the right amount of sloppiness to add a
balance of character between the brickwork and the underlying tc block
so that the usually clean lines of properly laid brickwork would not
stand out from the erratic character of the tc block... and this was
gaged with it in mind that it would be painted. I went away thinking,
cripes... if they see that brickwork they will wonder what the hell they
paid us for.

][<

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