The only thing better than having fun with one grandchild is having fun with all of them at the same time. We attended the local farmer's market on Friday evening with Juniper and Henry. Phoebe was already there, face painting as a fund raiser for her next trip to Africa. Juniper had her face painted of course and then insisted on painting grandma's as well. Phoebe lent a steadying hand to paint a big purple heart (grandma's favourite colour) on her cheek. Grampa minded Henry and of course paid generously for the experience.
Good form
When people ask what we are building next door we tell them it's something that will make our house disappear. They believe us to be joking for our house is a bit of a landmark, but the Hazelnut Inn will handily draw attention away from our home with it's much fancier architecture. Today, the carpenters began tipping up the forming for the giant firewall which will run along our shared property line. Our house instantly disappeared (from certain angles). This is only the first story of the wall which will go up two and a half times this distance in places. Once the concrete is poured the real interesting work will begin and happen quickly. This is going to be a whole lot of fun!
The bucks stop here
The windows of the Hazelnut Inn suites are not square but irregular with some rounded edges. These shapes give the carpenters some pause but for us they are simply fun. We carefully designed the shapes of the windows in our routing software. These computer files were passed on to the window manufacturer to ensure accuracy in their build of the window frames. To create the non-traditional spaces in the concrete walls for the doors and windows we needed to build some special forms called bucks. These will be placed in-between the concrete forms and then stay in place to fasten in the windows afterwards. We used those same computer files to route the plywood shapes around which we built the bucks. The curved sections were fabricated by laminating six layers of treated plywood. Once the walls are poured we will remove the plywood middle portions. The windows will then take their place.
