July 11, 2011

day 5 - rebuilding the chimney with power outage...

... yup... a power outage... really...

Week from hell... both B and I have deadlines at work... B has the Chicago to Mackinac race this weekend... construction schedule is very tight... electrician starts Wednesday, and he's squeezing us in, so we can't push his start date... Jose and his crew still have to do a bit of tuckpointing on the interior, and finish furring, in some cases framing, the walls, so that the electrician has something to which to attach the conduit...

... so, of course, at 8:30am a storm front would have to blow thru, with winds of 85mph, knocking out power to over half a million homes in Chicago, including ours... and of course ComEd would continue to notify us all day that they don't have an estimated time for power to be restored... could be 12 hours... could be 48 hours... could be 72 hours...

Jose and his crew are returning tomorrow morning with a generator... and ass will have to be hauled in order to be ready Wednesday for the electrician...

The day was not lost... the sun came out and chimney master Giovanni showed up with his side kick Cesar, plus 2 other guys (who kept changing the subject when I asked them their names... should I be concerned???), and built a brand new masonry beauty...

... Giovanni constructed a little tent around the chimney, to (somewhat) help provide some shade... given it was about 95 degrees today on the street, it about 195 degrees on the roof...

... this is Cesar. He's my new best friend... he is the happiest man... he doesn't speak much english yet I managed to have a 30 minute conversation with him...
 ... he gave me a hug after they packed up and were ready to go... the man radiates happiness.

We still will have to add caps atop the chimney stacks... there are four total within that one chimney... two feed our house and two feed our neighbor's house... we'll deal with those in August (Giovanni is going on vacation for three weeks starting this Thursday... I want a three week vacation... ).

Given the power outage, plus a few other surprises, tweaks, and add-ons, the construction schedule has been revised a bit:
... still on track with completion date!

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