click on ‘picture to see slideshow

Some of the future Boys and Girls Club members are showing up to the site to help! It’s pretty uplifting to see them taking pride in their Club.

click on ‘picture to see slideshow

With a generous donation from Mitsubishi, as well as from Mr. Marusich and Wittichen supply, the Boys and Girls Club now has an air conditioning unit for the classroom! We decided to hide the unit by creating a cavity in our storage room that is open to outside air and ventilation, but accessible only from a secured room on the inside. We let the cedar siding louver around the vent fan to optimize the unit’s air flow and performance.

click on picture to see slideshow

click to see the progression of our lamella roof basketball court

perspective looking north

recently completed lamella

veiw of lamella from top of gantry

another hot day of lamella!

the site gets clean for pig roast!

spectator benches for the lamella basketball court

‘the wave’

johnny parker’s animal twin

24.10.07

things have been going pretty well lately. we got everthing done last week we were hoping to get accomplished and we should be in good position to get everything ready to pour the slab this weekend. at this point we have the majority of the formwork up and we laid out the vapor barrier as well as the insulation and wire mesh. we spent the rest of the week getting drawings and things together because we weren’t going to be able to pour until this weekend.

everything looks pretty good for us to be ready to pour on saturday. john will be gone becuase it is his mom’s birthday, so we will be one down over the weekend. this week we need to lay the radiant floor tubing as well as level and straighten all the formwork. from here we have to make some decisions on whether to go ahead with framing or push to finish the rest of the concrete work which is the basketball court and front driveway.

here are some time lapse footage of us getting ready for the slab pour. enjoy.

11.10.07
it is always nice to have company on the site, last week we had a pair of chicago architects Ravi Ricker and Cheryl Noel of Wrap Architecture. They were a big help and it was great to have 4 extra hands on site for a few days.

We finished up the edging on the east side of the grade beam as well as finishing epoxying the bolts on the grade beam. They also helped dig the slab turndowns of both jutouts which was a huge help. as well as getting ready for the slab to be poured we finished laying out all of the water piping and got the electrical conduit ready for the wire to be pulled first thing next week. at this point pretty much everything is going according to plan if we can get the bobcat first thing this week we should be able to fill in all the trenches for the plumbing and start forming up the slab.

hopefully we will be able to pour the slab within the next 2 weeks. we still have to get all the form boards up as well as laying all the plastic, wire mesh, and radiant floor tubing. if all goes well we should be ready to go by this weekend. we still need to grout under the columns as well as finishing the column welds and welding the receivers to the bressemer beam.

well last week proved as exciting as the week prior. we found a boom truck and got the bressemer beams in place on wednesday. johnny parker came out and helped us tack weld the columns in place, we will give them a final weld this week. we also finished setting the anchor bolts as well as finishing the plumbing. we got the anchor bolt holes finished on monday and finished the plumbing on tuesday. we filled the plumbing trenches up to where the pipes come into the slab, from there we filled them half way to lay our water pipes in the same trench.

it was pretty exciting seeing the beams go up and it was quite a spectacle with the boom truck and johnny up on the scaffolding welding. we also filled in the french drains, so hopefully our drainage work is done.

this week we hope to rent the trencher on monday to dig the electrical and waterline trenches. we went to buy conduit last friday and should be ready to lay the pipe tuesday and we would like to grout under the columns and finish welding the beams in place. once that is done we can cover the trenches and start putting up form-boards for the slab.

here is another slide show of the week.