Monday, May 23, 2022
As you all may know, I am an Entertainment Director by trade. That sums up as being someone who does everything from creating wild and woolly spectacles on demand to booking bands, comedians, showgirls, clowns, photoshoots and now, apparently, elephants. (See theimaginationcircus.com). I also run an event rental space called Ravenswood Loft, which is a lovely space that hosts a variety of events, many of which celebrate life and love, as well as corporate retreats, crafter nights, art exhibitions and occasional rehearsals and photo shoots.
This is all to say, life has been a bit of a snooze in the past couple of years, which is what gave me the space in my mind and life to decide that I was going to build a coach house in the spring of 2021, and decided that I was going to host the project as a public record on this website. Life in 2022 has been very different. While, yes, we are still struggling with this crazy pandemic, people have been itching to get going, and as a result, my career planning things for others picked up considerably since January of this year. JUST ABOUT when things with my coach house picked up considerably. I have been able to manage juggling all the bits and parts in the past months....how, I'm not even sure. But I have been able to. What I have not been quite as able to do is keep up on the recording of coach house happenings as much as I had hoped. I have so many posts of momentous steps (and missteps) in the coach house project nearly in the can, and will be posting them as I carve out time.
Now, as we are about to enter the 6th month of 2022, and about to end the 6th month of construction since breaking ground, I am both in the home stretch and find myself with a little break from the pounding (albeit fun and exciting) demands of my regular work life. I have the next 30 days, by plan or coincidence (maybe the coincidence is that it was a celestial plan?) and I am what I would consider 90% done with the coach house project. I will be dedicating myself to writing every day as I scratch the line items off the list on my way to completion of 'Maison Galaxie'.
Today, Monday May 23 had much to do with sewers. Not the most inviting part of everyday life, but an important one. The fellas came out and dug a huge and deep trench in what was once my beloved garden (silently weeps) with the plan to connect the coach house to the city sewer line via my catch basin. Sounds relatively easy, no? No. The digging of ditches is seemingly a regular occurrence at Maison Galaxie. I have exactly 4 ditches presently on my property, consuming about 25% of my property that does not have a building currently standing on it. That's a lotta holes. And they are deep. Like if I had bodies to bury, now would be the time. (I don't, by the way, but the week is still early). The guys who came and dug, Oscar and Andy, are great. Nice smiles, good music, willing recipients to my ice coffee offerings (Oscar, not Andy), and, by the end of the day, understandably frustrated by the bizarre configuration of 110 year old clay pipes below my building. The clay has posed challenges for them, which is exactly NOT what you want to deal with after having dug a 30ft trench 5 feet deep and 3 feet wide, on a Monday. They have proven themselves to be master engineers, imaging angles that are needed to squeeze '10 lbs of potatoes into a 5lb bag'. Tuesday they will start again to hopefully finish.
Me, I worked on protecting my neighbor's structure with extra bricks from my build, distributing the mounting buckets of winter compost under layers of displaced soil in areas that I know I want to flourish once the garden is put back where it is supposed to be, staining brick mold and jambs for the installation of my first hand made entry door (!!!!) which will be installed on Tuesday, framing out the medicine cabinet in advance of Tuesday's start to the drywall project in the coach house, and doing my final measurements and cuts for the 3/4" birch plywood that will be my cabinet. I decided that I wanted to have the pantry go right up against my studs vs have it on top of a layer of plasterboard. It was a solid 13-hour day for me. Not nearly as backbreaking as Oscar and Andy, but I will definitely feel it in the morning. Tomorrow begins the hanging of my entry door, the drywall and the pantry. But not until I get to the loft to wash and wax the floors for Tuesday's class. Set the alarm for 4:30 am. It's going to be a long one.