These last three weeks have seen much less progress than we were hoping for. With the framing mostly complete, we are hoping to start on the mechanical, electrical and plumbing rough-ins. Unfortunately, we have been having a difficult time scheduling our contractors to come on site. As several of my contractors have told me, the biggest issue (for us) has been that Chicago is seeing a great deal of construction and there simply aren’t enough guys around to complete the work. Its to the point where many of our specialty contractors are trying to hire on more guys, but can’t find anyone qualified enough to be brought on. The amount of work is great for our contractors, but this is delaying our project.

So while we wait, we have been able to get more masonry work done on the outside of the building. Back in March, we had mentioned in the blog that our masonry contractor had come through to sandblast and clean the brick. Much of this brick and mortar were in really bad shape, so we needed to tuck-point the whole building. Our contractor grinded away the old mortar and refilled each seem and space with new mortar. The side walls used a grey colored mortar, while the front used a red color mortar to match the brick. During this process, our masonry contractor found that the wall above the window on the north-east bedroom was so deteriorated that he was concerned it might buckle under its own wait. He therefore, took this part of the wall down, installed a iron support beam above the window, and rebuilt the wall back to the roof-line.

The other masonry progress in these last few weeks has been the dismantling of what remained of the front stairwell. The concrete has been broken up and hauled away and the bricks have been taken down and stacked to the side to be re-used. This has exposed the compacted dirt that was originally laid and compacted underneath. We intend on rebuilding the stairwell to its original condition and character and so we’ll reuse whatever brick we can so that we can match the front building facade. Unfortunately, the majority of these bricks are cracked and broken, so they will probably be only used as filler.

The final worthwhile update is the bad luck we had with the Chicago weather. We had a big downpour that sent a lot of water into the building. We noticed that most of the water came through our back addition as the water poured down from the roof onto the back wall. Because of this, we asked our roofing contractor to install the back gutter as soon as possible. This is earlier than we wanted this installed, because it will inevitably get dinged up during construction, but it will hopefully save us from more water damage in the future.