Not sure I'm going to post much of what I wrote in my t+30 entry: I was in a weird mood and was venting some. I'll edit it and post what's left perhaps later tonight.
Today was a good day and a frustrating day on the jobsite. We are trying like the dickens to get School Build 4 off the ground. Even moreso (hmm...spellchecker don't like that word...welllll...tuff nuts!) because the fellow that raised the funds for school 4 is here onsite and really wants to be here during the build. We were trying to have the foundation complete for his arrival so that he could participate in the raising the walls, installing the tin roof, and be here for the grand opening. That may not happen, but we are still trying hard to get rolling on it. Today was spent 'pushing string'. The foundation of the original building is still intact and we think we can use it to build on. So today we started laying out the walls, figuring out the high spot/low spot of the foundation, and trying to maximize the dimensions/square the building, etc.
We've got a water level (a clear hose filled with water - works on the theory that water always finds it's own level) but it's only 25' long. Our buildings are 70' or so. Not being able to reach all way around the perimeter of the building without moving both ends of the water level makes for a real PITA. So we put a laser level on the wish list. Unfortunately we got a laser level that is good for hanging pictures in a living room not shooting 70' foundations. Sometimes even english to english communication falters! LOL
So anyway, back to our story: there we are with the 'big guy' donor on site and we are moving string around on a footing of boulders cemented together and calling itself a footing for our school walls. We find that there is a 9" difference in height around the perimeter so we will be building a concrete stem wall to put the bottom plate of our walls on that varies in height from 3 1/2" to 13 1/2". Wayyyy more than I'd expected, but waddya want where recycled plastic 4' levels are the only measuring device around (they become quite bendy in 100+F heat just to add an element of uncertainty to the whole affair).
Then we start to dial in the orientation of the walls on the existing foundation. Wall 1 no problem, wall 2 no problem, wall 3 no problem! Wow this is going great...ahh...but wall 4 tells another story.
As we start running our 4-5-6 pythagorean theorem on this last wall we discover an ugly truth: this last wall is so out of square to the rest of the structure that despite it's 14" width we cannot skew the overall structure enough to get that one 18' wall to land on the foundation all along its run. CRAP!
By now it's the end of the day and we pack it in and head back to base on foot since the site is only a 7 minute walk.
We get back to
HODR base and Matt comes up with some further news: Haiti is going to start requiring compliance with a 50 square meters/classroom beginning in September sometime. In anticipation of that we are going to start our compliance with School 4.
So the day of discover, frustration, and delayed dreams is actually a bust: we are going back to the drawing board to enlarge the building which further means we can't use any of the existing footings/foundations. LOL
