Starting to Get Some Traction (this is a big one)
Published By mike
I know I haven’t posted much in a while, I apologize for that. Here’s the (lengthy) update!
Let’s start where I left off. The variances that I applied for (height and distance from the road right of way) were both approved! The Stearns County Board of Adjustment meeting for October was on the 26th and the Board did not seem to have any issues with either of my requests, even citing that just across the street was a building that was over 100′ tall (the Church) vs the 35′ tall that I’d like the bar to be.
Since then, we’ve made some serious progress with the project. We decided to save quite a bit more of the wood used in various places in the building to be reused for decorative purposes (accent walls, etc.) in the new place. I’m hoping that this will help tie the new construction together with what’s currently there and make everything look like it fits. On the 28th with the help of Al and Dad, we removed a bunch of the wood from the walls in the pop/oil shed area.
One thing that we noticed when we were tearing the wood off the walls was that the wood on the ceiling/roof looked pretty cool as well and would be fun to save. I headed up on Friday the 3rd to spend that evening and Saturday the 4th tearing the roof off of that section to save the wood. When I got there, I walked around back of the building, opened the door, and was perplexed to see daylight. I looked up to find that Al had already torn the roof off of that section and saved it for me. With that wood saved, I scheduled the Braun Excavating to come out and tear off the back corner of the building and to dig for the new foundation.
With the wood from the ceiling saved, Dad and I pulled out one of the lifts and decided we’d see how difficult the stucco was going to be to get off of the north side of the building. It was not easy, but it seemed like once I got it started it went a bit easier. I snapped a picture of some siding that hadn’t seen the light of day in probably 100 years.
With the wood saved, Doug Braun came and tore off the back section of the building on the 8th. I got a little snap-happy with the camera (aka iPhone).
The rest of last week, Doug worked to pull up the rest of the concrete around the back side of the building and dig for the new foundation.
We got REALLY lucky and were able to get a concrete team scheduled for yesterday (13th) and they had the footings poured and the foundation laid in a day.
I also had a meeting with the lumber yard and the construction crew to effectively kick off the build part of the project yesterday. (yay!) We’ve got the new trusses (both the new floor joists and the new rafters) on order and the construction crew is lined up to start building in the second week in December. To help them keep moving along Dad, Al, & I started demo in the area where they’d like to start building, above the old grocery side. We got the stucco pulled off the wall up there and were able to pull the siding off as well and save it. (sorry i didn’t take a ‘before’ picture!)
Well I think that’s all the updates I have for you right now. (as if it wasn’t a boat load already) I’ll try to stay more on top of the posts as we go so they don’t get huge like this one did.