Dennis Hollingsworth

By the Way...

Oh yea, and writing of construction... here are a couple of shots over my wall into the site of my neighbor's rennovation of their house. The shot above is of their yard. You can see the well in the corner (there's another out of site to the bottom of the image here). Coming from California, the standards here are very loose comparatively. The earthquake codes back in Cali are beefy and these look sooooo sketchy to me.

You can see the new column to the right of the picture. Stacked masonry units. The footing was dug out, a six foot cube of earth... and a little steel was placed into the bottom, then much concrete poured (prepared in a small mixer in site) with a little steel positioned at teh top for the column connection. Back in California, that hole would have been set up with a steel cage with bottom, middle and top steel all tied securely together and linked to the column with leveling plates so that the steel in the column would be fixed to the steel in the footing.

Over here, you can mix a little mortar, stack a few rocks one atop the other and this assembly would stay together for hundreds of years, no problem. That is, aside from social unrest, anarchy, burning and looting... no harm would come to it for generations.