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Since my last post we have taken grandkids to Holiday World in Santa Claus, Indiana, and made a nearly day-long visit to Indianapolis. But we've been busy planning and making drawings to try to assure ourselves everything will "work" as we want it to.
Today we spent most of the day in Bloomington getting things for the apartment building project.
First we visited Bloomington's Habitat for Humanity ReStore. It's one of many such Habitat for Humanity stores across the US and Canada where Habitat sells donated building materials that cannot be used in the construction of new Habitat homes. Some material is new, surplus from building projects, and some is removed from homes being remodeled.
We found a window the right size for the landing in the stairwell-to-be. Then we found an entire set of kitchen cabinets, 12 units in all, built of solid oak. I won't brag about the great price (plus an additional discount for the next two weeks on everything in the store) except to say that the units are in great condition and about a quarter the cost of roughly the same set of units with laminated surfaces priced at a big box store. They had been in the ReStore for less than two days and we were lucky to find them.
Next we visited a salvage yard to look for some steel plates to spread the weight of the posts for the second floor over a larger area of the concrete slab. I found two thicker ones that had holes in them already, and one about twice the area of the others that could be cut in two. The three pieces together weighed over 100 pounds!
Just down the road the owner of a welding shop cut the larger plate in half and burned two small holes into each one for bolting them to the floor.
I'll bolt each of them to the floor through small pieces of plywood and attach the bottom brackets that will hold the posts in place to the plywood. The alternative would be another hole in each plate and a few-inch-long pin that would extend from inside the post into the concrete. Too much effort. The weight on the posts will make them nearly impossible to move, so the simple method I'll use should work just fine. The post bases will look something like this:
Then we stopped at Lowe's to order the siding, 72 - 4' X 8' sheets, about a case of large adhesive tubes for the rough floors, and some double joist hangers for the areas adjacent to the stairway openings. Lowe's cannot deliver the adhesive on the truck with the rest of the material because it is considered a hazardous material. (It's OK for the untrained consumer to take it with them in a car though!?)
Then we were on our way home. Temperature on the bank sign: 100!
