As long as it's not phlegm, we can fix it.

The above was the punchline for any mistake in the punchlist today. Someone of our merry band of four (the project engineer from the contractor, one of the owner's reps, the electrical engineer, and me) described a passionfruit as having "seeds surrounded by phlegm", and it was all downhill from there. On a good punchlist, most of the stuff that needs fixing are small dents in the drywall and mistakes in paint. Sometimes, the paint is too thin or you can see brush strokes in the paint. Sometimes the paint forms in blobs that need to be sanded or cleaned off. Sometimes sealant between casework and a wall or at a windowsill blobs onto another surface or dribbles down. Those blobs (of whatever substance) need to be removed.

We're never sure what to call these blobs when typing the punchlist. Usually, it's up to me, the "articulate" one, to come up with an appropriate name for these blobular blemishes. I usually say something like, "Remove excess paint drippage from windowsill." However, necessity is not just the mother of invention; it is also the crazy aunt of creativity. Other names that have been offered up for the paint and sealant drippage:

• paint boogers
• goobers
• gunk
• funk
• phunk
• ook
• blobs
• pooky

That last one was offered up by one of our party with small children.

We spent some time this morning backchecking rooms that weren't ready to check at earlier punchlists. Then, we checked the patient wing. For some reason, even it still took about 6 hours to get everything done. By the end of it, we were worn down, which is a hazard. A hazard not just in terms of being tired while driving home, but also a hazard in that one doesn't check things as closely as one should. Unlevel ceiling grid and unaligned cabinet doors sail under the radar, and operation of faucets don't get checked; there needs to be an overt hole in the wall or an entire door missing for something to be noticed. By the very end, my electrical engineer, Ursula, didn't even notice that an entire light fixture was missing in a bathroom. I happened to notice because here salt-n-pepper hair wasn't glimmering like it usually did under the compact fluorescent can lights. I pointed it out, she looked up, and said, "Huh. Good catch, Pix."

However, the building looks fan-freaking-tastic.

Pixie Clinton and the Pee Funk All-Stars

Last week, Denver got two inches of rain in a day, which is a lot of rain for us. Not only did we get a lot of rain, but it was accompanied by some major-league wind. Lots of wind + lots of rain = water in our enclosed balcony here at El Condo del Pixie y Guy. Our enclosed balcony has always been our storage area and cat litter room, really something of an afterthought in the spaces we inhabit each day. Located on the north side of our place off both of the bedrooms, we usually keep the blinds closed anyway, so the condition of the enclosed balcony never really crossed our minds...until this week.

We had been smelling wee-wee on and off this spring (a particularly damp spring), so on a whim Guy scored a good edal on a black light on eBay. Friday night, he cut off all the lights in the house and walked around, looking for glowing splotches that would indicate kitty pee. Nothing much in the house, perhaps a few splatters in my bathroom where Maddy lays on my rug, but then he walked into the back balcony. "Good GOD!" he exclaimed. "It's like they don't even know where the litter box is back here!" The funk was emanating from the enclosed balcony. It was 11pm, though, so Guy decided to do more investigating on Saturday. Sleeping that night was intolerable--despite having a bunch of windows on the balcony open and running a fan back there, the stanktageousness came in waves. I rubbed my face and hands with a lavender balm/moisturizer to counteract the fumes and go to sleep.

I came home Saturday afternoon to find most of the balcony's contents in our formerly-clean living room. Guy ripped up about 40 sf of carpet and found a puddle of water underneath the carpet and pad on the northeast corner. "Okay, first of all, why is there a pad under this carpet?" Guy asked aloud to no one in particular. (Note: Guy used to install carpets and parquet flooring with his brother as a summer job.) "This is an outdoor space, really, even with these flimsy little walls around it. And why are there wood nailers around the edges of the room? Now there're holes in the concrete floor, and we're gonna have to either leave them there or fill them in, or..." He shook his head. "Fuckin' ridiculous."

The funk was even worse Saturday night. I was tipsy from one glass of wine at a seafood restaurant and could barely sleep anyway, but the smell was even worse. Between the Death Funk 4000 Remix and dinner not agreeing with him, Guy spent a fair amount of the night in the second bedroom, where somehow the funk was less funky.

Today, Guy ripped out all but about 20 sf of the carpet and put it, strip by strip, into plastic trash bags. Technically, we're not supposed to dispose of remodeling materials in our condo's trash, but we have less than 120 sf total to throw out, so we're not taking it to the municipal dump. Hence, Guy's parsing it into several bags, which he will dispose of over the course of a couple of weeks. When he put a strip of carpet and funktified padding into a plastic bag and let it sit for several minutes, about a cup and a half of water collected in a corner of the bag. Eeuuww. No wonder the house was rank; the moisture combined with cat pee made for a funk that wouldn't dry out. Guy sprinkled the bare concrete with baking soda and has left the windows open. It'll be in the 50s tonight, so it shouldn't be too bad.

There's still more work to do back there. We need to remove the big chunks of carpet glue and repaint the balxony, reseal the base of the wall around the outside edges of the balcony, and maybe put a small rug back there just as something warm to stand on when cleaning a catbox or ironing or getting something out of the freezer. We're also going to take the opportunity to purge the contents of the room. We only have 1,315 sf total in our unit, and we need to use the space more wisely. Getting rid of some stuff will make that easier, we're sure.

I have to be in Wheatlands at 8am tomorrow again. We're punchlisting the exterior as well as the patient room wing. Hopefully, I can sleep tonight without having my olfactory senses assaulted with the chemical equivalent of a frying pan and an atomic wedgie. It would be nice to drive to Kansas with a good night's sleep.

Detail of the Week: The Long and Winding Road

Okay, this is kind of a detail but kind of not. I suppose it's more of an explanation than anything. Yet again, Wandering Author's comment on my last post asked how is it possible to design a room into which it is suddenly found impossible to move equipment. There's more than one reason for this happening, all of them perfectly legitimate.

First: most medical equipment companies understand that not all of their products are sold to brand new facilities. Often, equipment comes crated in more than one piece, and someone moves the crates into the finished space (i.e., with flooring, paint, wall base, ceiling, lights, casework, etc. in it). Then, the installer (sometimes that's the general contractor, and sometimes it's a special installer either from the equipment vendor or approved of and trained by the vendor) unwraps the equipment and moves it into place, hooking it up to power, water, etc. Hence, it's generally not a problem to fit a piece of equipment through a 3'-0" opening.

Second: it's easy to read equipment sizes on the vendor's cut sheets and not make the connection. The sterilizer in question in the last post is described as being 35 7/8" wide. A door is described as 3'-0", or 36" wide. Sounds good, right? Ah, but remember that door frames have a stop in them that the door whacks against when it closes. This door stop is usually about 1/2" to 5/8" deep. So, in a good situation, the actual opening in the door frame, even if you take the door off its hinges, is only about 35". That little fact is easy to forget. Granted, sometimes the doors coming into a soiled processing room is more like 3'-6" wide or even 4'-0" wide, but those doors are also very expensive, so when the owner needs to reduce costs and assures us that all of their soiled processing carts will fit through a 3'-0" door, then we'll give them 3'-0" doors because they'll work just fine for daily use.

Third: there's a shitload of medical equipment in a 70,000-square-foot hospital, and it's no surprise that something's not gonna work quite right, not fit in its spot, or not fit through a door. Sitting on my desk right now is a book of equipment cut sheets for this project, and I kid you not, the binder is eight inches thick. It's the biggest 3-ring binder I've ever seen, and the sheets actually are bursting out of it. When the equipment consultant and I looked at the cut sheet while on the phone together, she said, "Well, I reckon they were expecting us to actually have time to read the whole cut sheet, huh?"

So what do we do with the cut sheets? And what the hell is a cut sheet anyway? Cut sheets are the pages that show pictures of a piece of equipment and also detail how big it is, how much it weighs, what kind of electrical power it needs, what kind of water supply it needs, what kind of ventilation needs it has, and what areas of clearance are required around it (to name a few things). For more complicated pieces of equipment, the cut sheets also detail information about mounting the equipment (does it go on the wall? does it sit on the floor?) and what the contractor needs to provide in order to install the equipment (the equipment comes with the mounting plate, but the contractor will need to provide unistrut supports above the ceiling). The design and construction teams use the cut sheets to make sure they have everything they need to make sure that the equipment can be used when they get there and will actually fit in the room/on the counter/under the countertop/under a 9-foot-high ceiling. Usually, reviewing these cut sheets allows us to notice if something's really big, but alas, we missed this one.

Honestly, Wheatlands has gone pretty well in terms of equipment coordination. The sterilizer and a surgical scrub sink have given us issues, but that's about it. Equipment-wise, we've been lucky.

It's always at the last minute.

Lordamercy, y'all. The past few days have been riddled with emergency calls and last-minute issues at Wheatlands. We're less than 60 days away from ribbon-cutting and opening the doors. On Monday, it was locating the laundry equipment that just got bought because everyone thought someone else was buying it. On Tuesday, it was mitigating storm drainage off the roof through the hospital's front yard. Today, it was finally wrapping up a long-overdue RFI pertaining to some extra equipment for the radiology department. I swear to Barry Manilow, if it weren't for the last minute, wouldn't a damn thing get done.

About 3:30 this afternoon, after the storms have passed, my job superintendent calls.

"Hey, Pixie, it's Mutt."
"What's the good word, sir?"
"Hey, um...y'know the pass-through sterilizer in the surgery department?"
"Yeah, what about it?"
"We can't get it through the door into the room."
"......."
"Pixie?"
"I'm here. Um...what're you thinking of doing about it?"
"Well, see, we're gonna have to take a door out and knock out some drywall to bring it in, but I thought since we'd be taking out a door, should we just go ahead and order a new four-foot door for that room?"
"What's the lead time on a new door and frame right now?"
"Six to eight weeks."
"So the door would be missing when the hospital opens?"
"Um...[swears under his breath] yeah."
"Let me make some calls."

I call the equipment consultant. She calls the sterilizer vendor. She calls me back. I call Mutt back.

"Mutt."
"Tell me something good, Chaka Khan."
"Well, I feel for you."
"Ha ha."
"Yeah, yeah. Look, the sterilizer: the equipment consultant says that the sterilizer might need to be repaired, but it won't be necessary to replace it until about ten years from now, at which piont it'll be time to renovate and they can put a four-foot door in then."
"'Kay. So we're keeping the three-foot doors?"
"Yep, we're keeping the three-foot doors."
"Pleasure doin' business with you, Pixie."
"Likewise, Mutt."

LIke I said, if it wasn't for the last minute....

Random Tuesday Amusements

Though I've been pulled off the Pomme de Terre project indefinitely, I'm still on the emailing list. One of the project managers in our office sent out the following email today:

Team: [One of the engineers] will be out of the office starting today and will be returning Friday May 11th. He is available by cell phone in an emergency. He and his wife are about to have a new baby!

The partner on this project, Bosley, a usually crusty and cranky fellow, responded thus:

Nothing worse than a used baby. Glad they're getting a new one.


Meanwhile, I spoke too soon yesterday about being underemployed. We had an equipment emergency at Wheatlands (something wasn't going to fit, didn't get ordered at the right voltage, blah blah blah), so I worked through lunch in order to have enough time to finish drawings for Prudence. When I finally gave her the set at 4:45, she was surprisingly courteous and thankful. As I was walking back to my desk, an associate in the office who has worked with and shared staff with Howie in the past stopped me and asked if I'd have some room to help him on some projects that may be about to crank up and run quickly. While I don't want to lose my position on MCRC, I sure don't like being unbusy. I'm keeping my fingers and eyes crossed.

Much ado about nothing...to do

I find myself in the rare and odd position for being underemployed right now. Now that Jacqueline's back, Howie has pulled me off of Pomme de Terre. I suppose that's not a bad thing, per se; after all, who needs the madness? However, working on that project was helping other people and giving me something to do with at least 20 hours of my time per week. Meanwhile, Wheatlands is winding down in a big way. My next punchlist is a week from today, and the next one will be two weeks after that. Now that the building's nearly done, there's not much left for me to do. A couple of weeks ago, I was foisted onto a small office project for Prudence, the head of our interiors department. While Prudence's project has been able to fill in my 40 hours for the past couple of weeks, I'm at the point where I either need to take these drawings all the way to construction-document quality or I need to find something else to do to help fill out 40 hours.

MCRC has yet to begin...still. They've purchased a site, but now they need someone to run the hospital while the doctors who own it practice pshychiatry instead of fill out paperwork. (They had a guy who was gonna run it, but his experience was more towards regular hospitals, not psych facilities.) Howie keeps sending me heads-ups on different little projects that are just barely beginning, trying to keep me busy and in the loop on something, anything, but I'm just not fully busy.

At this point, I'm first going to check with Prudence as to how developed does she want this little set of interior tenant infill drawings. After that, I have a couple of people to talk to that Howie said need help. However, I'm a little concerned because the teams Howie mentioned are working, or about to start working, in Revit, which I have yet to use in earnest.

It's weird how tired you can be after a long day of stretching 6 or 7 hours worth of work into 8. It's a double-edged sword, stretching work. In the short run, it's not a bad thing. You try to spread out your hours for a few weeks, and then something starts up and you're busy again and it's all good. But if you have to stretch for more than a couple of weeks, it'll wear you down, especially if you're stretching your time on projects that aren't yours and you don't particularly enjoy and have a hard time taking ownership of. I'm strangely tired and, despite the fact that the sun is coming up earlier and earlier each morning, I'm having a hard time getting out of bed to work out and get started each morning.

Architectural work--business, indeed--is cyclical like this. You're busy, then you're not, then you are, then you're not. It's just how it is. Gotta say I'd rather be busy as hell than bored as hell.

Detail of the Week: Mama said punch you out

I keep blogging about what I look for in a punch list, but it might be easier just to show you a few examples.

These door and drawer faces are looking good. The drawer faces are all in line with each other, the handles have been installed so that they're secure and parallel to the floor, and the doors and drawer faces are in the same plane. In other words, they just look like how you'd expect casework (cabinets) to look.

These doors are just barely off plumb from each other. I would note this in the field on my punchlist and put a piece of tape by it only if the space between the cabinets was noticeably not parallel all the way up to the top of the doors. I might also note the space between the doors as being too wide, unless this is a uniform look amongst all the doors in this building. By the way, the casework needs cleaning in both of these photos.

The top of these two photos is an example of both bad paint and a bad wall base corner. The paint along the wall corner on the accent paint wall is streaky from where the painters went from a roller to a brush. Ultimately, it looksl ike the painters still need to put another coat of paint on the wall in its entirety. Also, note the corner on that wall base: it's been split at the top. Actually, it might be two different pieces that have been stuck together and crammed into the corner--you can especially see the crammed look at the bottom of the wall base, where the bottom should flip out but doesn't. Pixie says nuh-uh. The bottom photo shows the right way to do base: miter the corner. Miter each end of the base so that the bottom flange is continuous all the way around. However, I can't tell the quality of the paint job from the photo.

This is bad ceiling grid. Granted, the photo is a little blurry, but you can see that the edge angle of the ceiling grid is not level with the drywall above the window. Also, someone needs to touch up the paint in this drywall over the window and finish caulking the window.

Mmm, yeah baby, that's a nice grid angle. (Cue wakka-wakka 70s guitar.) It's even with the window opening all the way across. However, someone still needs to apply sealant at the edge of the window frame. Keeps moisture and air infiltration out of the room that this window is in.

In other news, I got some nice bookstore/coffee shop time in last night, but alas, both Guy and Sarge lost some cash in the poker game. Evidently, the landscape department swept the poker tournament. How do those tree-planting so-and-sos manage to do that at every poker game? My next-door cubicle neighbor, Derek, managed to get to the house early and got to meet and pet Maddy, who was a complete petting-whore for him and even twitched her tail like she was happy to see him. As if! After Jimmy Ray showed up with his poker table, though, Maddy ran and joined Hazel, hiding in the bedroom, where we kept them for the rest of the evening. With eleven poker-and-beer hounds in my clean, lovely Modernist condo, it was probably best.