After being out of town and missing a week of blogging it is time to put the figurative pen to paper and catch up, and there’s quite a bit to catch up on!
It’s always nice to be able to begin by highlight a completed piece of work so let’s kick off by giving a shout out to the wall that runs along the front of our old building between the angel’s office and the day school entrance. It has been transformed from an ugly duckling of a building eyesore (who can ever forget those perpendicular, 10 inch wide, white, wooden, planks that divided the wall and gave the impression of a retro “Tudor Look*”), into a beautiful swan of a structure that's so easy on the eyes. I have to admit there are still some small issues with rainwater creeping in between "roof and brick" but soon the final trim will be installed and those leaks consigned to history. Let us stay with our old buildings by shining a light on the office corridor inhabited by Father Bob, Mother Ashley, Gretchen and the duty angel. First I need to give you a little roofing background; the new pitched roof meets the existing pitched roof somewhere above Gretchen’s office and the new flat roof meets the existing pitched roof somewhere above Father Bob’s office. I’ve looked at the roofing plans but have absolutely no ability to extrapolate a 3 dimensional roof structure from a drawing so those “roofing buffs” amongst you will have to pardon my inability to express the roofing challenge in technical terms. To the layman, and to be brief, this meeting of the old and the new is the roofing equivalent of the seas off the Cape Horn, it is a veritable maelstrom of seething shingles and flat roofing that will need some significant work and no small amount of expertise to bring harmony and calm to the clashing roof lines. Unfortunately to achieve this harmony the existing roof over Father Bob’s and Gretchen’s offices will have to come off! Now you can’t just rip off a roof and expect everything to go well (we tried that already), the weather has had more than it’s fair share of impact on our construction so it’s more than reasonable to assume there will be rain whilst the roof is off. We could just ask Father Bob and Gretchen to come to work dressed like Bering Sea fishermen but when it wasn’t raining there would be dust and noise to contend with and then there’s the office contents left exposed to the slings and arrows of outrageous weather. What do you do? Well you wait until the tree roots in the cemetery are turning an autumnal orange and the Rector is taking a short and well-earned break then you deploy a highly skilled “strike removal team” (actually Gretchen Hood, Blair Hood and your correspondent). This strike team packed up the office including its books, mementos, coffee cups, guitars and furniture and moved it all into storage (a.k.a. the kitchen, corridor, library, and Mother Ashley’s office). So my fellow parishioners, until the roofing is done, new carpets laid and a dash of paint added to the walls please spare a thought for Father Bob “the Wandering Rector of ODEC” Randall as he seeks out a place to rest his travelling iPAD! Staying with the roofing topic for the next item. Avid followers of this blog, or for that matter the occasional reader, will know the great hall and narthex concrete pad has been laid and the steel wall frames have been erected. However, unless you have recently passed by the ODEC campus you may not know that it’s “roof truss and beam time!” again. Some weeks ago, a low loader delivered the great hall and narthex roofing trusses and beams and since then their presence has been a reassuring indicator of what was to come and now that time is here. For the past few days Miguel, Juan, José (not their real names) and their team mates have been back on the site working their magic to bring order to the scattered heaps of trusses as they frame out the great hall’s roof. I have absolutely no idea how the team select the trusses so they are laid out in some (to me hidden) logical order on the temporary frame they constructed at ceiling level for this purpose – and it’s all done at lightning speed with a rather spectacular looking blue forklift machine! It’s progress on all fronts and so until my next blog stay safe and stay healthy, David Beach. Tudor Look*: Building style that pays homage to the Tudor style of building in England (1485 and 1603). A heavy wood frame supporting walls made of wattle and daub, which is a wall where vertical wooden stakes, or wattles, are woven with horizontal twigs and branches, and then daubed with clay or mud. An authentic period dwelling with its visible black beam skeleton framing white wattle and daub walls is very attractive but, at least for me, that’s not the case for buildings constructed in the Tudor look that was so popular in the UK in the 1950s and 1960s.
1 Comment
Mal Higgins
12/3/2020 01:43:24 pm
David, I had grown so accustomed to the Tudor look (and did not even know that was what it looked like) that I now sort of miss its quaintness. I wonder if wattle and daub would have been a bit cheaper for ODEC's new building?
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AuthorDavid Beach is our Building Project Manager, and has been an active part of our parish family for more than a decade. He is retired from NATO and the British Army and is a joy and blessing to all of us. Archives
July 2021
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