Week 5: Concrete!

We'll were not exactly paving paradise, and there will be no parking lot either but the concrete has arrived. This is the first of many concrete pours at 2323 N. Milwaukee over the next few months. Thanks to Joe the Concrete Guy, we have new footings in place for our walk-in cooler in the basement. A couple feet of Chicago clay were removed to make some headspace for our tanks that will hold the precious beer you'll get to drink.

In the picture you can see the forms in place for the upcoming pour of the walk-in cooler foundation wall. This is set to be combined with the pour of the structural pad for the fermentation cellar in the next load. The plumbers need to lay the trench drain before that goes down, but we are not too far away.

Upstairs we've been enjoying tossing lumber and drywall down our new indoor ramp. The old partition walls were full of two by fours and we tried to remove them whole. And while we didn't spend the time to take out all the nails and reuse them, someone else did. Yesterday, while we were having lunch around the corner we left the dumpster door open and someone in a pickup helped themselves to the good sticks. How about that market-driven recycling? For folks without internet access, an open dumpster is the equivalent of Craigslist free section, minus the all the spam postings. I find the hardest part of recycling building materials is completing the match-making process with limited time and space. We don't have room to store everything forever so we've tried to prioritize the 'best' material like all the old beams.

Speaking of which, anyone like to carve a few fists out of some 13-foot lengths of 100-year old 11" x 13" Douglas Fir?