Cutting steel with fire

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By the time I showed up -- 9am -- on the day the structural steel was suppoed to start going up, they already had 6 columns up. Rain caused some delay, but the steel went up pretty quickly. There are still about 11 pieces left for structure, but they won't go up until the second floor is decked.

As you can also see in the photo, the steel/eps panels are starting to go up. For some reason, they are not going in as smoothly as we hoped (I know, what the heck were we thinking daring to hope something would go smoothly). It seems they were made with pretty tight tolerances and steel is not very forgiving. The company that made the panels had a bit of an upheaval and our house was one of two caught in the middle of it. About 15 panels were missing, a bunch were the wrong size, etc. Thankfully, the owner has made three trips to Dallas already to get things right for us. We still are not there yet, but at least everyone is busy. It is kind of like taking the long way to avoid a traffic jam... It might not save you much time in the end, but it always feels better to be doing somthing than just sitting around.

Some good news, we did get our garage door at 1/2 price because the company had 20 surplus 16x7 flat panel doors in white. That works out to $450 installed. WHoo-hoo! Also, as much as I like the Modern Fan company ball fan ($270 each -- we need 5), Home Depot now sells an industrial fan (Dayton, Westinghouse, Ellington make similar fans) for $60. It has plastic blades, so I don't feel so bad about having them mounted on 8' ceilings (all but one of the Dayton fans suggest a 10' minimum blade height, partly because of the steel blades -- ouch!). Also nice about the HD model (Hampton Bay), it has a mount which allows for angled ceilings. All of the other industrial fans are meant for flat ceilings. Although aesthetically, with a higher and flat ceiling, I like the white Ellington industrial/utility fan. I love the way the blades turn up at the ends.