Well thats a little different, isn't it now?

Star, Megan and I got to pay a little site visit this morning to get some detailed dimensions, and whoa boy - things are little bit . . . umm - different - than we had been thinking they were. Not that I'm worried or anything mind you . . . not for an instant. Really. It's just that . . . well, things are just a little different now - but change is good right? Or something like that.

Megan and Bertha. God I hate that thing.

Star and one of the little guys: when we first started this project these things seemed like such a pain to deal with - but now they are the least of our problems.

So we had most of the small vents in approximately the right place - the two which defined the kitchen were very wrong and so that changes the walls and doors quite a bit. The real change in the layout is the stupid Trane Air Intake thing which is actually 2 feet further into the kitchen than any of us had known. The problem is, this changes [but not that much] the way the floor beams get laid out and makes the column-line 2 really wonky. So now we need to have an extra beam and another cantilever and some other weirdness - but all that is fixable - its the floor that is the real problem as far as I'm concerned.

Your guess is as good as mine on where exactly the finish floor here is. It's gonna be hard to open that door with 6" of floor sitting in front of it though.

The problem is that when we went in Feb there was a waterproofing membrane laid over the concrete plank which was laid flat. This is exactly what the drawings showed and we assumed that they would be sloping the insulation to get the runoff to the roof drains. But when we showed up today it seems that they have actually built up another roof made of small crickets which slope towards the drains, made of plywood and then another layer of waterproofing was laid over the entire thing. The Insulation is gonna be laid over that and then the concrete pavers on top of them.

Roof Drains. Great.

So what that means for us is that there is no flat level structural floor for us to drop our floor beams onto in any simple fashion - we're going to have to use short little 6"-ish columns which get us up above the new cricket-floor and then we can set our beams onto those. But this means there is absolutely no way we'll be able to recess the floor beams below the level of the concrete pavers which means that the beams protrude above the floor level, forming a step which means that we can no longer have ADA access through any of the bays with the beams in the floor which means that we have to almost completely redesign the 'kitchen' since the access points are now way different.

Ummm . . . Yeah.

Not that this is a problem mind you . . . just, ya know, things are different now.

Ohh - the cornice is on now too. Still a long way to go though.

So now I am going to redesign and redraw the steel based on the modified floor plan dims, recalculate all the beams as like 18's since, as we all know: "deeper is cheaper", draw a section of the 'floor-to-6" column-to-W18x beam' detail, cull through all the photos from today and try to figure out all the vertical dimensions [we got kicked off the site before we could record them all . . .grrrr] and then . . . .um . . . oh yeah - figure out all the pricing for this before our 4pm meeting tomorrow. Whoa-boy, I'm gonna need some loud music for this one.

But first . . . some food.