Construction has FINALLY started! It almost seems unreal – it’s taken so long to get to his point…

The first item of business was replacing the old construction fence which was an active violation because it hasn’t been built properly. Here’s the old fence…

The new fence is a thing of beauty… Our contractor built it on Friday and then painted it and put the signs up Monday morning (he didn’t even spill a drop of paint on the sidewalk). Nice color choice too!

The guy two doors down put up a construction fence and it looks awful (need to get a pic of it).

Next up was the joists between the cellar and the basement. Here’s a picture of what we started with…

The joists are being “replaced as necessary”. As you can see they were so rotten, it was necessary to replace all of them…

It feels very tall and narrow… We’re going to cut down and use the old joists to build a screen between the hallways and the stairwell in our unit. So you can see in the picture they’re being stored for later use. The joists may not be good enough to be joists anymore, but their “good parts” will still be in the building when we’re done. Not exactly “original details”, but it will be original materials – we just don’t have much to work with given the condition of our building.

And if you’re worried about how many joists we’re taking out at once… It’s been discussed and we’re trying to be conservative about it. The issue is that the joist pockets are being leveled with a laser leveling device, so it helps to have them all out. Once we get up further in the building we’ll just take half our at a time since after the first two floors the floors will basically be in two sections – front and back.

Today and Wednesday the contractor will be prepping the joist pockets and taking down the remnants of the old fireplace in the cellar. Thursday he’ll put in the new joists, and Friday we’ll probably have a floor to walk on. (Imagine that… lol) At that point he can get to the back yard more easily, etc.