YEP, WE'RE BACK AT WALLKILL, NEW YORK!
Happily, Jeremy and I were invited back to Wallkill last week for another three months to work on another residence building being renovated here at the Branch. (if you have an excellent memory you recall we were helping a little on a demo project just as we were finishing our last year assignment, well that demo is now at the "rebuild" stage)Last year we talked constantly about the renovation of the E Residence building. Well, the E Residence is finished
and here it is across the pond with the expanded dining room on the ground floor. We helped tile everything on the left side of the bldg. (Right side was finished when we arrived last May)
Below is one of the lobbies in the finished E Residence. Above the stairs, the stairs, the lower floor and the wall decor is all tile. Pretty isn't it?
Now it's going to be all about the D Residence building. There are, of course, lots of other things being renovated or constructed around Wallkill, but it looks like the D Res is going to be our assignment. :) [But, I promise to give updates on the other projects here in the next update.]
This lower shot is our view from the D Res. We get to admire the pond and E Res in the background.
Initially we were scheduled for a full week of orientation, which includes housekeeping training, laundry training and dining room etiquette. But it turns out tile work needed to be address immediately. Bethel must also be counting on us remembering the importance of leaving your counters clear and emptying trash in your room every day (housekeeping), of how to stack and list our clothes for laundry service as well as knowing not to double dip into the butter dish at meal-times. Happily, we do recall all such orderly behavior to fit back into the Bethel lifestyle. :)
It looks like our assignment will be bathroom work in the D Res. Large showers with tile wrapping around the room like a wainscoting just high enough to be a backsplash for the sink areas. The rooms we start in are for the renovated infirmary, so there is no lip into the shower from the bathroom floor. This translates into creating absolute perfectly flat floors with perfectly pitched shower drains so there is never standing water.
Phew. Perfect can be tricky.
So this first week we are all about grinding and chipping down the concrete floors and pouring a smooth concrete like material called self-leveling. It allows us to level out floors that weren't. FYI: This picture to the right was after our first day at work. My brand new boots were dark, chocolate brown eight hours before this photo. They will never be THAT color again!
