Alternate title: “A Tale of One of Two Towers” or “How to Use a Chop-saw from a Bucket-truck…”
In last week’s exciting episode, we did a bit of work on the tower. This week we moved it even further along.
Our scaling project is nearly complete. I’ve still got a lot of trim to do, the area around the windows to work on, and primer and paint, but I’ve got enough done for the moment.
The tower was looking rather dilapidated and that was imparting an “attitude” to the entire square. I didn’t like that.
My immediate objectives were to make the place look a lot better and to stop things from falling off the building.
We have accomplished that and so much more.
Sooo…off to the pictures!
Oh…a bit of a story on this one…see, my wife is not quite ready to run the saws yet. She’s never done that sort of thing (I grew up with it), and with nice, sharp, flesh-rending equipment it is important that you do it right.
I’ll teach her…when she’s ready…but she’s not asked me to yet.
Anyway, what do you do when every shingle left to mount needs a cut and there’s nobody handy to run the saw?
Well, I set the saw up in the window so I could reach it from the bucket truck
This worked out well…the wife still providing the blanks and running other parts and materials for me, but I could make the cuts without exiting the bucket.
A couple hours of work or so...whilst I'm 'up there'.
Occasionally coming back down to make a mess:
And the shingles are done!
The obligatory 'this thing is really tall' shot
The 'distance' shot
I was careful to catch most of the junk that came off the tower and put it in a five gallon bucket (okay, LOTS of 5-gallon buckets), but there was a LOT of material and some got away. We were left with a mess on the awning.
Stuff on the awning
MORE stuff on the awning
So…time to clean up the awning then. We don’t want this stuff blowing all over the square. There was also a bunch of broken glass, apparently from several replaced windows in the past…about 40 pounds of it, that I removed from the awning.
No help for it but a broom and a bucket...and some careful movement of the boom to avoid hitting stuff (signs, wires, lightposts, flags, small dogs)
Nothing left but a bit of dust! There were 5 buckets worth (2 full of nothing but glass!)
I still have to do trim, the shingles around the windows, and some caulking, priming, and painting, but our objectives have been reached for the moment. It looks so much better! We’ll work on the rest a bit later.
And just for a quick look-see…
From this:
Needs a bit of tinkering...
To this:
Shingles done! Looks good, yes?
Next weekend we are back at the Old Vic, scraping, priming (we hope), and preparing for guests!
CUAgain,
Daniel Meyer
