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I'll post more when I have time, but today is a red letter day as the new windows go in the Hub. The 113 side shown has the banner this's been up since Friday to celebrate Audrey & Louis Kariel's 60th wedding anniversary.
You can't see it very well, but the original 1897 doors are also in place now, and the recessed panels on the bulkhead are complete. Now the remaining trimwork on the outside can be completed.
Great day this morning at the ballpark when Collin & Parker's White Sox had a doubleheader against the Royals. Jamie and Grayson were headed to Dallas to see Xanadu so I took the twins and worked with Collin before the game started on a major change in his batting - we switched him from batting right-handed to left. He's seemed so uncomfortable swinging lrighthanded that Jamie suspected he might be like me - writes right-handed but bats left-handed. Turned out we were right - after a couple of practice swings the little toot hit three out of four practice balls I tossed at him (I don't think he had ever made contact with a single ball - even in practice - before that).
Collin bats after Parker (that's him batting and Parker on first base in the above - wonder how many brothers get to follow each other in the batting order) and his first bat up he nailed one in between first and the mound. He dropped the bat (he said the ball knocked it out of his hand which makes sense - he'd never hit a full-speed ball before) so he walked over, picked it up, and calmly went back to the plate to wait for the next pitch (while we are all screaming at him to head for first base). After all, no one ever had told him what to do when he actually hit it!
So the next time up Parker hit a single, and on the second pitch Collin hit a foul ball, but he drops the bat and runs faster than I've ever seen him run to first - where he meets Parker and they high five and jump around. So we're one step closer - we can hit and run. He then strikes out on the next pitch.
Third time's a charm - sort of. Parker has singled again (that's two hits out of three at bat, which is a Smith family record going back two generations, I can safely say) and Collin gets a hit that goes straight forward partway towards the mound, and he drops the bat and starts doing this weird dancing zigzagging run towards first as Parker heads for second. The fielding is so slow (he's put the ball right where the pitcher and catcher can't figure out whose ball it is) that he gets on base, and only then does he turn and we can see he's screaming and there's blood coming from his hand - the ball hit his left thumb. But he was determined that he was going to make it to base - he just couldn't do it in a straight line. So we take him and ice it down and he's so brave and stops crying and we go sit in the dugout and show off this really cool cut on his thumb and how purple it is under the nail (his teammates think it's really cool).
We come home and put a Sponge Bob band-aid on it and he figures out how to play DS with it, goes swimming with it, and when he comes in after that to get a new band-aid because the old one came off, he's forgotten which finger was hurt and he's trying to get me to do his right index finger because it now has a small cut. So he's fine. But it was a good day for both the boys - for some reason Parker has now started connecting, and Collin is a different player now that he's batting lefty. Jamie was right - just one more tiny way he's like his dad (God help him).
The week started off slowly but things moved quicker as it went along. First of all, as you can tell in the picture, we got the problem with the left side backer board fixed - the upper part is now flush with the sides so that it can be tiled all the way across, as it was originally (in the '40's). On the right side, the finish trim has started going on - the boards shown on the right are just placeholders to remind me to draw up the final pattern, which I did today
, based on the picture we have of the original storefront. (Translating an 1897 photo into the appropriate illustrations from Palladio's Quattro Libri and then back out again and into Lowes SKU numbers is something I particularly enjoy. Which is a personal problem I have, and I know it, so don't bother telling me). You might notice that the downspout boxes are out on 113 and you can see sky through the right hand one - we're keeping the ones for 111 but rebuilding the 113 so they drop straight down on the facade and not the beautiful cast-iron pilasters that frame the opening. (Color is becoming an issue - should the cast iron be black or green, and should the gutters be brown or green? Or both? Decisions, decisions...)
Inside, Saturday saw the insulation going into most of the interior walls, which means the place is beginning to take shape (and sounds a lot better, I noticed). This picture is looking down the main hall towards the break room past conference #1 and my office.
The workers have spent the week learning how to put up metal ceilings as they first replaced bad sections of ceiling using the extras we harvested from the boys' "treehouse" in the back (we were taking it out to allow the headroom that the vaulted roof framing would allow). It took two days to learn how the cove and two border pieces were supposed to go up (two of the three had curved wooden backs so they have the correct shape once up - we didn't realize the significance of that till they were up the first time without them) which is a nice way of saying that we did it once, realized it looked like crap ,then took it down and did it again. But the effect of the restored cove and frieze panels over the back of my office (they used to be at the back of the building but that would have put them in the little seen upstairs playroom) is stunning since it brings a lot of architectural detail to where it can be seen and appreciated - I'm really happy that we put them up here, even though technically they were not here originally - they were hidden back in the storage mezzanine. In this picture you can see the vaulted ceiling of the "treehouse" room upstairs - more on that in future posts. The view looking forward from my office is getting better as well.
Although with all the flaked off paint the ceiling still looks superficially terrible, all the damage has been repaired and the effect is really noticeable - you can see the pattern of circles and diamonds marching across the ceiling in sharp relief thanks to the light from the high windows in front. Still have big hatch holes in the skylight shaft, but we're working on that.
A bazillion inspections are scheduled for next week as the sprinker starts to go in, a whole lot of window glass gets installed in the front, and the facade trim gradually gets put in. We're still not ready yet for sheet rock yet, since the electrical needs some more tweaking so the right conduits are in for videoconferencing, A/V and so forth, but we are inching closer.
Busy weekend with the boys celebrating Easter. Friday they were out of school, and had their first swim of the spring (I didn't know Jamie, who was taking a nap, had already told them no because it was too cold, so I said yes. We all got in trouble for that one).
Saturday they played so hard that during dinner Collin and Parker both laid on the couch and fell asleep. It was too cute for words.
Sunday we wore out new matching outfits Jamie got us to church (we didn't dye Easter eggs this year - we just dressed like them). Then Easter egg hunting went well this year - fast and nobody got their feelings hurt!
It's taken me a long, long time, but I finally finished this encyclopedic set of lectures on the visual aspects of the Roman Empire. I have to admit I didn't realize that's what this was - I thought it was a survey of the historical layers of the city of Rome, but I ended up enjoying it nonetheless. It goes into sometimes excruciating detail (some lectures I napped through and had to replay) but I did learn a lot about why things looked the way that they did. The best lectures were near the end, where the professor took you a fictional visitor on a trip through Pompeii and Rome, pointing out all the things they'd see and experience (and want to see) on such a trip. Since Jamie and I have been to Pompeii and spent several days in Rome a few years back, the locations were familiar to us. Especially in Rome, where we understood where things were in relation to the Capitoline Hill and had seen the foundations of the ancient Temple of Jupiter that was the centerpiece of the city. One surprise was that the main street of ancient Rome, the Via Flaminia (Via Lata once it entered the city gates) - is the main shopping drag now, the Via del Corso, so we had a sort of armature of streets we knew that made the locations make sense.
Good set of lectures, but they could have been condensed substantially -there were six lectures on arena combat, executions and games. It's nice to understand how prisoners were executed and gladiators were trained and fought, that that's a little overkill (pun intended).
After a day each for demolition and concrete footing work, the actual new facade framing (including actually designing the thing, since we didn't have any construction plans) took two days, finishing up yesterday afternoon. The right side of course will end up along the lines of this photo, which I've posted a million times, it seems like.
The left side, however, currently 111 E. Austin, is a bit of a moving target. Back in the early 1900's, it was "Neville's Place" which looks to me like a saloon. (In the 1870's it was a bakery, but I haven't researched its pre-Hub history extensively. Yet). When the Hub moved in from next door in 1928 the entire facade was rebricked to raise it to the level of the 113 side and put in nice display windows (in much the same way that I suspect the 113 side was gussied-up when in 1897 it went from being some sort of metal shop to a nice shoe store . Anyway, at some point later (probably late '40's, the parapet was stuccoed and the streetfront - including the clerestory windows - was tiled with black and red tile, with a striped awning. This photo is the only one I've been able to locate that shows this appearance.
Later in the '60's or '70's this was in turn covered over with brown aluminum framed windows and a white aluminum parapet.
But the appearance of the tile (as well as the big surprise that the big neon sign was still there) is shown much better from this photo taken last November immediately after the facade came down.
We chose to restore the 111 side to essentially this late '40's or '50's time period, since it matches well with the Hub outside and there are several other similar black-tiled buildings downtown. While the black tile (with red stripe) and a similar Hub-logo sign is what we have in mind (the original will likely go up high on a wall for display inside in much the same way that the Museum of American History in Washington D.C. used to display the Star Spangled Banner), unfortunately the tile was too damaged either from the attachment of later facades or from rot in the backing to save, so we had to demolish the entire facade below the stucco and reframe from scratch. The final appearance with be similar tile-wise to the picture from November (plus awning), although we have moved the door out to street level and adjusted the side walls in a bit for various reasons, including the installation of the Bo Ellis Memorial Water Faucet for use irrigating the planters that will be put in once we're done. So the vertical studs up high will be covered with tile, the opening below that are transom windows, and the streetfront door and windows are below that (hidden by the dumpster, as is the knee-wall echoing the display windows).
One step closer - hopefully by the end of the day we'll have backer board for the tile, which will close in a big chunk of the 111 side. 113 requires carpenters, so it make take a bit longer to get "in the dry" so to speak.
