How’s the Summer Reading Going???

From the lowest dungeon to the highest peak I fought with the Balrog of Morgoth until at last I threw down my enemy and smote his ruin upon the mountain side.

Darkness took me, and I strayed out of thought and time….

The stars wheeled overhead, and every day was as long as a life age of earth.

But it was not to end.

I felt life in me again.

I’ve been sent back until my task is done!

 

Gandalf after battling the Balrog.

 

This is basically what happened to me over the course of the last two weeks of work in Manhattan. You ever battle a Balrog? Well by the time Friday rolled around I was both physically and mentally spent. I live to fight another day! The battle at 220 Central Park South goes on. By the way if you want to see some pictures of that job and you have Instagram search for #220cps. There are a couple of good shots there.

Hello again friends of Middle Earth. How’s it going? I’m doing well if you’re interested. There’s much to talk about this week people. So let’s get started.

Saturday was Terence’s first football game of the season. They won! Winning is always good for morale. They played pretty well for the first game. Terence had a banner game too. It was a lot of fun. Luckily it was a home game and I was able to press into service Jude and Ethan into helping me install the Master bedroom window.

So this window weighs a lot. I would guess on the order of 600 pounds. So this is not something two guys can pick up and put into place. That’s not going to happen. Not only that but trying to install a window that heavy without a plan is not smart. So we had to put on our thinking caps for this one people. (But that’s what makes it fun)

So the windows came with a special lifting bar that actually hooks into the mullion or side of the window. Let me show you a picture.

Ethan holding the lifting bar for the window.
Ethan holding the lifting bar for the window.

So once you  hook the bar into the window you can use both hands to grab the weight of the window evenly and then lift with your legs. So what we did is sweep the room clean and then lift and land the window on two furniture dollys so we could wheel the window into position.

Window on rolling furniture dolls.
Window on rolling furniture dolls.

So you can see that the boys only had to lift the window up a couple of inches. which wasn’t bad. The next thing we did was slowly roll the window over to the rough opening.

Because the window weighed so much I made an extension with supports to land the window on. This really was done because the handle of the lifting bar would project into the window wall as you were lifting. Maybe this picture will help you understand.

Landing extensions for the window.
Landing extensions for the window.

This basically is a 2×4 extension with a 4×4 cut to fit as its support.  I nailed the 2×4 into the sill of the window with three nails so there was no way it would twist once we started to slide the window into place.

Once the window was centered in the window we used  cribbing to get  it to the right height.

What? Cribbing you say? Okay Moe you don’t know what cribbing is? How long have you been doing this for Moe?  30 years in the business and you’ve never seen cribbing. Interesting. Let me explain.

Okay Moe? (Reference: Larry, Moe, and Curly)

So you’ve probably seen, or maybe not, when they have to lift a house off it’s foundation or support something very heavy on one of those home renovation shows. okay so you haven’t. So you use  a series of blocks  to support the weight while the weight is at rest. Well in regular man’s terms it’s really just a series of blocks  that you criss cross over one another to slowly build the height up to where you want to go. This isn’t a very good explanation so I’ll just show you the picture.

Cribbing the window up.
Cribbing the window up.

So we didn’t have to go that high as you can see. So do you get how we did it now. I had Ethan lift his end and I put a block across the dolly. Then I had Jude do the same. Next I set up two 4×4’s parallel to the window running across the first two blocks. Once that was done I had then lift it one more time and add a final block. Then we were at the right height.  Then it was just a matter of carefully sliding the window into place.

1-2-3 done!

Leveling the window took a while. It’s pretty critical that you get it on the money. We used the laser level to set it. Pretty simple. Then we just secured it in place with the ties that came with the window and then removed all the protective coating stuff.

Jude and Ethan removing the protective coating stuff off the window.
Jude and Ethan removing the protective coating stuff off the window.

So we’re wrapping the whole thing up cause we gotta get to the football game and guess who wanders in as we finish.

Bob shows up after we're done.
Bob shows up after we’re done.

Its like the guy pops out of a hole in the woods. Then he starts muttering about his boss and going on this crazy long run. Whatever.

Ok so Bob is really into the house and he wants me to take a better picture of him for the blog. I mean the guy wouldn’t let it go.  I relented.

Bob checking out the operable window.
Bob checking out the operable window.

So it’s back to school on Tuesday here in the States. Terence goes back to high school as a senior this year. I think he just started his summer reading about 5 minutes ago. Fairly typical. We were reminiscing about how fast this summer went by. The Editor wished we could go back to June so she could experience the heat all over again. Terence wished for June too so he could push back his summer reading for another couple of months.

See you all next week!

Hobbit Hollow Jim

Ps: My Instagram account is hobbithollowjim. When you get a chance.

 

2 thoughts on “How’s the Summer Reading Going???”

    • Hey Mike! Yeah gotta get Bob and Steve back into it. It’s been a while. And how about those amazins. It would be nice if they got into the playoffs. Especially after all of the injuries. Anyway thanks for writing and I hope everything is going well.

      Reply

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