Happy 2011 to all of you! thread celebrated the holiday season and survived the mountains of snow. As you can tell from our recent lack of correspondence, we had a lovely time with our friends and family, and hope you did as well. But now we have a building to finish and projects to tend to, so the next many months of 2011 will be excitingly busy.
Our foundations are done! And just in time, before the snow hit NYC with a vengeance. When the snow has cleared a bit and the weather comes out of the freezing zone, we will be able to start the bearing walls, but until then our focus for the next few weeks are on finalizing our specs on the building envelope focusing on the windows, selecting exterior finish materials, and coordinating our LEED paperwork and energy model. Updates on each of these will follow soon, detailing our process.
Below are a few pics of the last casting of the foundation slab and walls, completed just before Christmas. The cylinders shown are for testing the quality of concrete, as required by the Department of Building. Recently there has been an increase in oversight and evaluation by the DOB of all concrete in NYC due to unfortunate improprieties in testing by certain labs discovered in 2009. The DOB is in the process of building its own testing lab, read here for more information on DOB required testing procedures, and here for more info on the new lab that is being built in the Bronx.
