Good morning. The shop is open, and I have a few photos of the Dilia School new roof project. The roof is complete, but lacks a piece of trim on the belltower corners, and I still have to install the downspouts from the gutters. Eventually this water captured will be sent to large storage tanks, but for now we'll just divert the flow to the ground, away from the foundations.
I will be trying the new DKos photo thingie for these, so bear with me as I figure it out.
Photos below the fold...
Here's new metal next to old, for contrast...
This is the east side, showing the door into the teacher's quarters, which appears to have been added later where a window had been. The edges of the old stone sill are visible.
and here is a view of the west side, where we can see where a pillar has been removed from between two of the windows to enlarge the opening. I presume this was done to facilitate unloading hay bales when the building was being used for storage. We will be rebuilding this column to restore the original appearance. Many of the stones that were removed are still laying around the site, and will be gathered and reused, as we can't just go down to the stone store and buy new ones. The old sills are still in place, as are the original stone lintels (headers), now supported by RR ties that were inserted.
(A note on using the Image Library: each time I embed an image, the code appears at the top of the intro text box, even though my cursor was trying to indicate where I wanted it in the extended text box. Each time I merely cut and pasted it to where I wanted it, no problem. Much easier to use than fotofuckit.
The next project is coming up, walls and the chimney, with two fireplaces in it, for a two-story adobe residence. I'm waiting for the owner to get his foundation together for me, but he is having some trouble with his concrete contractor, who is completely un-used to adobe construction and is a bit lost. The owner has asked if I want to take on the foundation as well. The irony of all this is that the owner and his contractor are local Hispanics from old families, but they are having to come to the old Gringo for adobe work, as none of them know how to anymore, despite his (the owner) having family members in the construction trades.
I am also torn between my delight at building a very traditional looking (for around here) farmhouse in a beautiful location against the mountains, and my knowing that this building is a complete disaster from a thermal efficiency or solar-utiliztion point of view. There is zero consciousness of using free passive solar energy for heating. The same pile of materials, used correctly, could create a spacious and efficient passive solar adobe that would require very little energy input for heating and cooling, but would look like something an outsider would build and not at all traditional. There is no way I could educate these clients about this; they are too embedded in their culture, not to mention in love with their plans, to start over at this point. Sadly, they will have a future of buying propane for their heating system.