Driving back and forth on the grain truck highway to Columbus this week was a time of hiding. Hiding the soil surface that is, the growth of the young corn plants are starting to hide the ground as the view turns green. The hiding process is starting in the AGR house at the same time.
Tom Langshaw was with me last week and he said all this work that we can see now is going to disappear. He is right. The dry wall is going up and with it all of the work that has been happening up to now is disappearing. All of the wall construction, those monstrous stacks of lumber that once existed, all the things in the walls, all kinds and colors of wires, the pipes and insulation, all that work that has been going on for months is disappearing from view. New rooms that did not exist before and so you cannot now see the whole area at once, it is necessary to peek into each doorway. And soon that will change, there is a huge stack of door frames in the living room that will soon be put into place.
Some of the foundation walls are poured up to ground level and the rest is scheduled to be poured in two days. Can’t wait to see that accomplished. We need that to happen so the walls can go up. It is progress but for this part the progress is slow. The drive by the church is full with a semitrailer parked there. It happens to be full of new windows. There are a lot of windows in this house.
A contract for furniture has been signed and it is scheduled for delivery and set up for the week of August 10. The contractor is still on schedule to be completed by August 1. This next month will see tremendous visual changes. Pretty soon it will start to look like a house instead of a construction zone which it is now.
I had lunch and conducted a house tour recently with members of the Sigma Alpha Mu renovation committee. They are about to embark on a project similar to ours, gutting the interior back to the blocks and 2 by 4’s. They were interested in our thoughts and the processes of our construction. I did point out to them that we no longer have a flat roof area where we can launch water balloons at their house. One of them informed me that he was one that launched back at us. It was a good experience for us when we toured the Delta Tau Delta house and I am glad to help the Samies any way I can.
Al Kingseed toured with me and he wondered what all of the sheet metal stacked in various places was for. This will be heat ducts, mostly in the new and the old dining room areas. Cable has been installed for TV and internet in all of the rooms. There are a number of places where things came through the floors in the past, like chimneys, dumb waiters and heat pipes that are holes where we do not want them now. On the last visit they were in the process of being filled in.
Should be a lot more dry wall installed on my next visit. More changes!
Bill
Beta Chapter, The Ohio State University 