Construction News

They’re digging up the intersection out front. They’re putting up forms out back. The bulldozer is doing something at the back of the property, and along the cyde-bissey street side they’re digging trenches with smaller ditches beneath them.

Out front they break for lunch leaving the machines blocking both ahr and cyde streets. Then a truck drives up, empty but reinforced sides. Then the company truck pulls up and 4 white guys get out having gone to daddy d’s , then the mexicans cruise down from the mexican house at the end of cyde street. The guy’s there to cut the tram lines that are under cyde street from the old days around the turn of the last century, when cyde street was the main drag thru the park instead of a dead-end side street, cut off by i-20 back when it was a slum in the 50s and 60s.

After the 1917 fire white atlanta decided to build up druid hills road and extend the suburbs, and the old city was allowed to lapse into decrepitude. Old white families stayed on in their houses, blacks moved in, and Mexicans, most of them renters; houses were subdivided into tenements and boarding houses. Anybody with money lived in buckhead or sandy springs.

Husband and thing two moved the heavy tracks to the front of the driveway. He wanted to have a piece of local history in the yard. We’ll use them as water barriers down the back. Half buried. We can perhaps use blocks from the street as barriers as well.

Out back there’s the sound of sawing through metal. Hammering the forms together. Beep beep beep. There’s three pickups parked in the shade of the ramp, with the bulldozer scraping along the back (toward the building) section, the high-pitched electronic chirp of the survey equipment maintaining contact with the gps satellite.

Out back a mexican worker cuts rebar. He leans over away from me, using a big boxy saw that emits showers of sparks into the silt fence, into the yard. Cutting through 2 pieces at a time then stacking them with the other 6′ lengths, then loading them on his shoulders and carting them off to the other end where they’re laying rebar. Got to walk all the way around to get to the vault. Part of the long alley side of the cut collapsed after the rain, covering the slab they first laid. I was fantacizing an accident. A pickup came down the ramp while he was between cuts and the guy picked up his saw and moved out of the way while he rolled over it. But he’d stuck it in the middle. But what if the truck had jostled it, and what if he’d neglected to weigh the rods down like he should and what if he’d just been standing there at the worktable holding his safety goggles and put them back down, and what if his cut went wrong, and what if the saw shattered and ripped him to pieces or the sparks set off a fire that burned the back yards and threatened the houses.

Forman was here for some of the morning. I didn’t get up until 10 with a headache because of the wine I anesthetized myself with last night when marie and tenant came over. it was fun, but I kept having to smile and be interested and find things to say. it was just slightly awkward, but they stayed until almost midnight anyway. Bison spaghetti, corn, bread, salad. Ice cream fruit and baileys for desert thanks tenant. I snubbed marie too I’m sure when I wouldn’t have any of her wine. I just didn’t take any, and continued with the red I was drinking, and only when she got up to leave and I made her take the bottle with her did I tell her that I didn’t drink white. Gives me a headache. I woke up with a headache anyway, because of three or four cups of wine. A chemical residue in your head and joints. A lethargy of muscle. The heat not so bad today because of pretty constant cloud cover. It’s raining all around us from a front to the nw, but it evaporates over northwest georgia and all we get is a cool breeze. That’s enough, but I may have to go water illegally again tonight. the azaleas sister gave me for my birthday have turned brown and shrivelled, so I’ve got to call proflowers soon.

These 2 guys came sauntering onto the proptery and disappeared at the back, then came walking back up to the ir truck, and back down I guess with tools because I didn’t see them go back, but I saw them coming back up the ramp with two big old pipes on their shoulders. I hurried outside in case they were stealing stuff off the jobsite, and got their license tag, and saw that it was a repair truck, and the guy had one of the pipes, old and nasty, and was taping the end of it, which was fucked up and broken. He said hey, I said hey, then wrote as I walked. They left soon after, when i was coming through the alley. Probably it was one of the form-bearing trucks that broke and axle yesterday and that would be why the trucks are still here over the weekend with half a load each.

The truck with the slabs on it is back, with another truck like it. They’re carrying boards and pre-made forms for concrete.

guy came over to get us to sign an indemnity statement. He wanted to talk to husband, but i started asking questions about did he get everything arranged with the dirt, and he said he’d negotiated another $5k to cover getting the trees taken down and getting dirt on the back yards, and he wanted us to know that the guy who was out doing the plans yesterday said we’re going to have trouble with out drainage because we wouldn’t take dirt because we wanted to save our trees (which he plainly thought ridiculous, favoring trees over the solution to our drainage problems, tho dumping dirt on it is only going to shift the drainage problem). I told him that forman had said something about running a pipe thru to the creek or the vault. He called the bean counter guy who said that we could take the cost of running a pipe out of the 5k, and nobody liked the sound of that. guy because he considered that money already spent, and me because we’re not putting any money into this project ourselves. The letter included the extra 5k as a collective payment, and it didn’t say what it was for, which i inferred meant that it was potentially to be shared by all. he went away and husband came back and i told him everything. He said he’d be in no hurry to sign anything. the nice gay guy came back, i fixed tea, we talked about herbal tea, he likes rosemary and lemon water. I left to do some housecleaning because we’re having tenant and marie over for dinner. Husband suggested that they separate him out from the rest like they did the out of state neighbor, and deal with him later, because he’s not signing off on a theoretical problem and solution without seeing what the rains do back there now that the hill is gone and there’s a ramp instead.

Then he went to see forman, who whipped out the plans for what they’re going to do with the stream. They’re going to cap it up top, and divert it to a 24″ pipe going straight down the alley to main street to connect to an 18″ pipe, where the plans show it connecting to the combined sewer/overflow pipes. Except they’re down there right now replacing them with the sewer separation project. The only problem he can see with diverting our drainage into it is that it might overflow the 18″ connection.

Later they both, simon and guy came over and closed themselves up with husband to talk about what was going on. guy pursued his own agenda with the bean counter the whole time, and it got quiet heated. He would say ‘but that’s not what I heard. What I heard was that the extra money was to go for specific things only, not as a catchall.’ The bean counter was making everything cost us money after dirt and fences and permits for the trees. The only solution to the drainage the bean counter could come up with was a swale filled with gravel going from the low point to the drain, some 3 or 4 feet overhead. We think the obvious solution is to put in a drain in our yard, at the lowest point, and feed it off into the freshwater (contaminated with freon water) stream running down the alley right there not ten feet away. somehow nobody on that side has suggested it, and they don’t hear me when I mention it. So husband is going to bring it up himself when they all meet with the engineer next week sometime.

We’ve decided that we don’t want a ramp into our back yard, which means that we don’t want access from the alley. The ramp would be very steep or it would have to curve to miss the dog pen, and either way it would be awkward, so we’re going to tell tenant, tho not over dinner, that he’s going to have onstreet parking only.

They didn’t work at all out front.

Friday 7/28

The truck with the slabs on it is back, with another truck like it. They’re carrying boards and pre-made forms for concrete.

guy came over to get us to sign an indemnity statement. He wanted to talk to husband, but i started asking questions about did he get everything arranged with the dirt, and he said he’d negotiated another $5k to cover getting the trees taken down and getting dirt on the back yards, and he wanted us to know that the guy who was out doing the plans yesterday said we’re going to have trouble with out drainage because we wouldn’t take dirt because we wanted to save our trees (which he plainly thought ridiculous, favoring trees over the solution to our drainage problems, tho dumping dirt on it is only going to shift the drainage problem). I told him that forman had said something about running a pipe thru to the creek or the vault. He called the bean counter guy who said that we could take the cost of running a pipe out of the 5k, and nobody liked the sound of that. guy because he considered that money already spent, and me because we’re not putting any money into this project ourselves. The letter included the extra 5k as a collective payment, and it didn’t say what it was for, which i inferred meant that it was potentially to be shared by all. he went away and husband came back and i told him everything. He said he’d be in no hurry to sign anything. the nice gay guy came back, i fixed tea, we talked about herbal tea, he likes rosemary and lemon water. I left to do some housecleaning because we’re having tenant and marie over for dinner. Husband suggested that they separate him out from the rest like they did the out of state neighbor, and deal with him later, because he’s not signing off on a theoretical problem and solution without seeing what the rains do back there now that the hill is gone and there’s a ramp instead.

Then he went to see forman, who whipped out the plans for what they’re going to do with the stream. They’re going to cap it up top, and divert it to a 24″ pipe going straight down the alley to main street to connect to an 18″ pipe, where the plans show it connecting to the combined sewer/overflow pipes. Except they’re down there right now replacing them with the sewer separation project. The only problem he can see with diverting our drainage into it is that it might overflow the 18″ connection.

Later they both, simon and guy came over and closed themselves up with husband to talk about what was going on. guy pursued his own agenda with the bean counter the whole time, and it got quiet heated. He would say ‘but that’s not what I heard. What I heard was that the extra money was to go for specific things only, not as a catchall.’ The bean counter was making everything cost us money after dirt and fences and permits for the trees. The only solution to the drainage the bean counter could come up with was a swale filled with gravel going from the low point to the drain, some 3 or 4 feet overhead. We think the obvious solution is to put in a drain in our yard, at the lowest point, and feed it off into the freshwater (contaminated with freon water) stream running down the alley right there not ten feet away. somehow nobody on that side has suggested it, and they don’t hear me when I mention it. So husband is going to bring it up himself when they all meet with the engineer next week sometime.

We’ve decided that we don’t want a ramp into our back yard, which means that we don’t want access from the alley. The ramp would be very steep or it would have to curve to miss the dog pen, and either way it would be awkward, so we’re going to tell tenant, tho not over dinner, that he’s going to have onstreet parking only.

They didn’t work at all out front.