Oxford Fencing Salle — Week 3

Now everything grows hazy and dark... not because we are depressed, but because the light fixtures started coming down.

Also, there has been two weeks of progress since the last update. We have pictures, but we have lost some of the details & stories about the work. We will reconstruct them here, or invent some new ones.

To the left, you can see we're making good progress on phase 2, the middle office. This is a big office, but we've gotten pretty good at taking things apart.

Before we completely demolish the middle office, we notice that the Air Conditioner unit is sitting on the roof of the office.

The air conditioner can't be seen in this photo. But that big brown thing (heater) is in front of it.

Doc buys some metal straps, and makes the cooling unit fast to the ceiling.

Walter poses for a picture. Moments before this picture was taken, he was holding five sheets of 3/4" plywood above his head with one arm. And laughing about it. He doesn't care. He's crazy in a sort of dangerous way.

Note all the layers of clothes, and Walter's protective layer of... weight. It is cold in the building — the building used to be a storage warehouse for beer, and it still remembers how to retain coolness.

The view from the front door. Pretty soon this will open out into an empty space.

Here is our grand plan: We're taking all the offices from the front of the building, and moving them to the back of the building.

The plywood sheets were under the paneling. We're not going to do that. We have enough paneling now, that if someone puts their foot through it, we can just give them a guilt-trip and then slap on more paneling.

From the front door — it's getting even more opened up. If that's possible.

Wiring (electicity) and all the building infrastructure like water pipes — these started getting complicated, the more we deconstructed.

Walter is pulling panelling from Phase 3 part of the building. This is old, splintery stuff from the 70's or 80's (we don't know). It was a massive pain to take down.

Now that the air conditioner is metal-strapped to the ceiling, Doc is removing the spars from the middle office. It's about to come down!

The general workspace. This will get much messier before it gets much cleaner.

Vicki is standing near the recessed 30x15' add-on to the building. In that area, we will be building His-n-Hers bathroom/shower/changing rooms, an office, and a lounge area. How will all that fit!? Wait and see!

Work, work, work. It felt very slow, but we were making fast progress.

We're getting ready to lift those beams down, and the pull down the walls.

Finally the ceiling panel brackets come down.

These brackets are fun to snap apart. They will be re-used in the new construction area.

An unobstructed view to the roof, from the middle office!

Et voila! The walls are down.

That big silver thing in the sky is the air conditioner.

Yassar showed up to help de-nail.

Later (not pictured), Charles and Charlie Burantz visited.

Everybody denailed like fiends — and made very fast progress. The wood in this picture was in piles by the next workday.

The main floor is starting to empty out. Phase III is coming up: pull down that last office.

The new view from the front door.

You can see all the way through to the back of the building.

We pulled up all the 3/4" plywood from the top of the phase3 office, and started getting at the wires. The roof also supported the hot-water heater, which had to be lowered down.

While pulling up the boards, Walter discovered that those beams aren't anchored very well. Without the boards to give them structure, they wobbled like crazy. So Walter took a short trip through the ceiling.

Doc is playing with the power-sucker. He's getting the floor cleaned up prelude to putting up the first wall of the new construction. He's standing where the women's bathroom will be... the inspector told us the bathrooms have to be handicap-accessible, which we should've thought of ourselves. We had to make a quick improvement to the the plans.

Our nail bucket. Every night, Doc goes through it and pulls out the salvageable nails.