7 A.D.: Universal Pain Assessment Tool

Sitting in the doctor's office waiting for the results of our son's flu test, I drifted to the handy chart on the wall to self-assess not only the fever boy sitting in my wife's arms, but the general state of our family after one week of construction.

We are decidedly in stage 4, the not-so-happy-but-not-so-sad-yet face.  Living in smaller quarters is a bit of a trick, as we have absorbed the demo-ed areas into our life.  The kitchen now doubles as a home office.  The living room houses outside toys.  And the dining room is a domestic United Nations, with a little bit of everything.

All things considered, a good week for construction.  But trying to manage sick kids, work deadlines, out of town family, and the holidays while living in a phonebooth will get us to extremely-unhappy face sooner than we can afford, given we have 4 to 6 more months of building.  We're going to need our daily dose of sleep and another course of stuff-thinning to ease the coming pain.

Here's how the week wrapped up out back:

Demo continued on the concrete slab while the pool guys began their work chipping and hacking away at the existing tile and plaster.  Four pool guys crushed through that work in a day.

The resulting look was pretty cool.  Hacked etchings crossed every way gave the pool a natural grotto look.  The green spray paint marks the new shape of the pool to guide the work.  On the left, you can see the pile of chippings, which they saved to reuse as a strengthener in the new slurry they'll pour.

When it's done the pool proper will be about half the size of the original, but we will have a hot tub and baja step as well, which will be much more useful than the twelve feet of diving fun that got old quickly (the pic at right gives you a good sense of how deep it was).

 

The slab (which was actually two slabs, one poured overtop and around a first one) was gone by Friday and they were putting the finishing touches on clearing out the two-feet of depth they will need to pour a new foundation for the addition.  Makes for a fun first step out of the back door now.

Finally, another hidden treasure from the past.  Hard to see from the picture, but between the sprinkler pipe is a petrified tree trunk that was buried under the previous porch slab.  Pretty cool.