Sometimes you get lucky. Sometimes you don’t.
Sometimes everything goes according to plan. Sometimes you have to improvise.
Lately we had a mixture of both. There was some great progress according to plan in the flooring department. There were setbacks in the roofing department. And then there was this issue just above the upper window.
You see, above each window there’s always some kind of beam. The really small ones have one in masonry, all the other ones have a steel beam with bricks in front and on it. This particular beam was in bad shape.
Unrecoverable shape.
The kind of shape that necessitated replacing the beam.
This meant we needed to find someone to do just that, and rather sooner than later. Through word of mouth we stumbled upon Kristof Cavijnt. A week later he was there with the new beam, and we could start taking down the bricks.
As the bricks used in our front facade aren’t (easily) found new anymore, we had to carefully take them out and remove the old mortar from them. Once that was done the beam could be placed, and the bricks placed again. With the old beam out it became also clear that this swap had to be done really really hard. The old beam had rusted, at some places being only a sliver thick anymore, or worse, see-through it all.
Funny how something can take two days to perform, and just a few lines to describe. Anyway, with this done roof guy had no more excuse not to tackle our little flat roof in the front. Speaking of him, it had been four weeks again since we last heard or seen him. His excuse? I don’t know anymore, probably the weather. By this time he had produced so many excuses that I stopped caring and remembering…
Any of you that have been up to masonry yourselves? How did that go?