Tree Planting

On Saturday we worked with a bunch of volunteers planting trees in the neighborhood.  We planted 70 trees and quite a lot on 5th Street.

We put a "Serviceberry" tree in front of our place on 5th Street.  I was just looking for a photo of the day we put a tree in on Randolph Street, and found it on my phone.

Contruction Continues

Yeah!  Hi Fives all around!  Floor in the studio is nearly ready to be poured!

This was quite a dusty day... We had to hire an excavator to come and break up the old screwed up concrete in the space that will eventually be the studio. Behind him, starting the wall between the studio and the kitchen / offices.

Oops!  Took out too big a chunk of concrete.  We now have a hole in our bathroom floor. 

Salvaging / Reusing

We have been pulling stuff from a great old warehouse nearby.  There's a cool older eccentric couple who live there and who among other things have built a small cruiser boat powered with a wood burning oven steam engine.  They are getting rid of some of their salvaged stuff collected over the years.  We got about 20 radiators, a lot of wood - cedar and pine, some cool old movie lights and a bathroom and kitchen sink.  Not only is it cheap, but it's such cool shit and it's nice to breathe new life into it, build with materials from the industrial soul of the city. 

The Looking Glass Studio - the recording studio owned by Philip Glass that my uncle Michael has been involved with for years recently closed its operations in Lower Manhattan.  Quite a sad end of an era but I had the good fortune of talking to the right person at the wrong time.  I was put in touch with the guy doing the demo, and I got ahold of a truck, drove up to New York and got a whole bunch of 1" thick studio glass panels (5' wide), two huge double-insulated sliding glass doors, a bunch of acoustic sound baffles, some studio racks and all the studio wiring I could get my hands on... A huge amount of valuable stuff for virtually no cost.  It'll all come in handy. Anyway here's a link to the Looking Glass Site.

120 windows in about 10 trips in the Tacoma.  Why so many windows you may ask?  Stay tuned.  

Finding Materials

The other day Catherine was out running and happened upon a bunch of guys up the street who were breaking up a slate sidewalk and throwing it in a dumpster.  She got two truckloads of the stuff...!   Slate's actually pretty expensive when you buy it, so I'd say we got pretty lucky.  

Construction Photos

1 1/2" industrial pine flooring.  You can see here the remants of the old floor line by the window.  This floor we're building will not go all the way to the window.  There will be a 6' atrium entry hall  going all the way up the ceiling - which is about 40' high. It's at least some way to preserve the majesty of the building's height.

Our cat, Verna, poking her head up... She has got a nice playground.  What you see below: We don't have any storage space out of the weather except in this construction zone, so there's a bunch of furniture, suitcases, boxes of books etc that sits under all this stuff, getting rained on with nails and dust... oh well.