Since last week, lots and lots has gone on at the Pope Residence project. Where to start?

Brick

The masons were still working on their first room as of early in the week. Lee was having visions of a $30K expense for brick work. That did not go over well, and he apparently lost it a bit at Cody (don’t ask me for details; they didn’t even tell me about it until Friday). Good news, though, once Kathleen and Chris joined the conversation, a new plan emerged and everybody is good with it. It’s so good that people can disagree, listen to each other, and come up with a new plan. I sure appreciate everyone’s willingness to do that.

So, the fancy masons are gone, paid well for the work they did, and we have a new crew working on the interior brick. Chris is not going back to the oil fields for a few weeks and instead is working as project manager. Cody is still the GC and bringing in his teams as needed. Chris has recruited Randy (who’s been doing a great job with demo on the Hermit Haus) and Easton (Kathleen’s daughter’s boyfriend) to do the brick and other projects that don’t require specialists. Their work on the brick so far is great.

We are saving a good deal of money on the project by doing some of the work ourselves, since these guys are fast and competent.

More Demolition

We had decided to remove the “laundry room” addition, and if it’s one thing Chris’s team knows, it’s knocking stuff down. So, yesterday there was a laundry room. Today there is not! The bonus to that is you can now look out the bathroom window and see outside. Even with the window closed, light now comes in. We now have space for a patio and a spot for the air conditioning unit.

In addition, the team has gotten all the old plumbing and fixtures out of all the bathrooms. The one in my office looks 100% better with no floor and walls (that tells you something about how awful it looked before). We realized that the bathtub in there was mostly in good shape, and a real cast-iron tub. So, we plan to put some feet on it and fix the one chipped area, then make it a real feature in the office. I wanted to also keep the sink, but it was too far gone. I’ll try to get a vintage-looking sink to replace it. And a really cool mirror. (Pictures are below.)

And Air Conditioning!

Yesterday, Easton bravely crawled on top of the main bathroom and put together a sturdy platform there to hold the inside unit for the new air conditioning system, which has a little traditional system, along with three of those cool new energy-efficient ones, with mini-splits. That way we don’t have to build a whole lot of ductwork in.

Today our old friend Felix and his crew showed up bright and early and got to work setting up the HVAC system. It’s pretty interesting. There are four separate, small outside units. One is the traditional one that covers Lee’s office, the hallway, and the bathroom. Each of the other rooms has its own unit that hardly takes up any space on the wall, and more amazingly, only required a small hole in the brick. These units are also very energy efficient, so we are pretty happy.

Here are some more photos to enjoy. We are really happy with how things are moving along now.

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