Guest Blogger Edition!!!

Hi there!  Karen is busy tonight so I (Brett) am going to guest-blog to provide the latest update.  I'm a blogging virgin so this may get a little messy.  

Our first photo is obviously not in Chicago so why is it here, you ask?  Well, a little background first.  We've been searching for brick for our patio and walkway for quite a while and we're rapidly approaching the installation phase.  Over the 4th of July holiday, we answered a Craigslist ad for a farm/silo that was being demo'd in Harvard, IL and this is what we found.  If you look closely, you can still make out the circular outline of the silo that stood here for 100+ years until being knocked down just recently.

The bricks look great and the company that makes them has an interesting history (http://www.historicalbricks.com/brick_history.html) so we are glad we held out and found exactly what we were looking for.  However, they're 9 pounds each and we hadn't exactly thought thru how to get nearly 3,000 of them from Harvard to Chicago.  After Karen spent several hours of hearing 'we can't help you' from various shipping and landscaping companies, I briefly contemplated moving them myself until Karen reminded me that I don't know how to operate a forklift and don't have a trucker's license.  And 50+ round-trips with the Toyota 4runner probably isn't very practical, either. 

Thankfully, we found a great little company who solved our dilemma.  Below, we see the full-size semi (13 tons of bricks requires a big truck!) being unloaded by Frenchie the truck driver.  And, yes, I asked Frenchie if I could drive but he wasn't letting me near either the 40-foot semi or the forklift.

Karen just checked on my blogging progress and said it was wordy.  The nerve.  Anyway, the City of Chicago likely would have frowned on us leaving the brick in the street so our buddies below were thrilled to move the 3,000 bricks one-by-one from the 11 pallets in 90 degree heat.....

To the front of our home where they sit awaiting installation within the next week.

While the brick was delivered, the work elsewhere didn't cease.  Here we have a drywaller doing his thing sealing the seams between the drywall and getting it ready for painting down the road.

One of the interesting aspects of this project has been working thru the low-voltage options (internet, cable, speakers, etc).  I talked to a few companies that happily provided quotes of literally several hundred thousand $'s to install every possible gizmo.  They didn't get a return call from me but I was able to borrow some ideas and decided to design a low voltage set-up myself.  After our electrician executed that wiring plan, here is a photo of the result in the office.  I sure hope it works!

In the meantime, the steelwork continues on the back patio stairwell....

Here we have two pros hard at work.  On the left, preparation of the next steel I-beam is done while, behind him, VERY LOUD jackhammering of the old concrete patio is underway.

Another exciting development over the past week was a 6' x 6' hole cut in the 3rd floor ceiling.

Thankfully, these guys work fast because the skylight was installed in that hole in advance of the crazy, recent storms.  Below we have a photo of the beautiful blue skies over the weekend.  The home design allows this natural light to illuminate all 3 floors.

 Thanks for reading and Karen will be back next week!