Stay in Portland

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Both Connie and I tend to get up early, which means we get tired early. We left about 11PM and I drove downtown to park and stay the night close to the downtown Bally so that in the morning I could go to the bathroom at Bally's and then on the Syda Yoga chant of the Gurugita. However, there were a lot of people around in the morning so I walked a couple of blocks to the park along the river and was able to see a bit of the Portland Marathon (shown here). Cool!
On Monday I went out with Wood Feathers Roofing Supply delivering roofing supplies. My job was to take packets of roofing tiles (weighed about eighty pounds) off the pallets and put them onto a conveyor belt where the driver would place them on the roof. On Tuesday I was back out with Warner Construction ripping off the roof at Peppertree Apartments again. I took this picture and made a short five second video (120K, about 40 seconds to download) of the the roofing material being run up on the conveyor. Delivering roofing supplies was intense work, but only for short periods. I figure that we did three deliveries in about four hours, but with loading the truck and driving it was a 10.25 hour day. That was a nice day. The roof ripping was a smaller building and we had four guys (they had about six) so we were sent home with only 4.25 hours. A nice short day after the day before, but I wouldn't like that regularly.
Here is the Instant Labor office in Beaverton, OR that I go to. It is their corporate office and has carpet and a regular reception area. Quite nice, but no bathrooms for the working clients. Oh well. Wednesday two of us were sent out to dig a trench for an electrical conduit beside a very nice house along the river, excellent view. The owner was having a generator installed because of medical problems. The clay was moist, not too dry and not too wet. We got 6.5 hours and it was a very nice day, all in all.
Thursday Instant Labor had more work than people (a refreshing change). They had six of us out to one house to do the final leveling around a mostly finished house. They gave us a bad address so we got a late start and they only kept us til 1PM. Only five hours which was a pretty inconsiderate of them. They should have used less people and given us a full day or, if it was a real crunch to get it done by 1PM, given us some little bonus for our inconvenience. Oh well, what to do? Friday and Saturday there were three of us finishing off the landscaping at this site.
They are getting ready to start construction of what looks to be about 15 townhouses. They wanted all the lots leveled and such so the county would approve the roads, sidewalks, storm sewers, etc. and allow them to start putting foundations in at the site (once the lots are approved). Along with finishing the landscaping along sidewalks and such (where the backhoe did most of the landscaping), we finished off this holding pond for the storm sewers. We dug out a 110 feet long 'stream' bed along the route following the tape shown here.
The 'stream' was two feet wide and had six inches of rise on each side with the rise taking two feet as well. The pink marks (above) got pretty confusing at first, but once the bed was graded it was pretty easy to build up the rises. The grade for the stream was only three inches over 110 feet. We used the laser leveler shown in the top left of each picture to get the grade right. Then we covered the surface of the pond with a kind of burlap net to keep it from eroding. Only the top section is covered with net here and you can sort of make out the stream bed we dug.
Just beyond the pond and next to the main highway (SR10) was a drainage ditch where we planted grass and put down a green plastic net with straw inside it to control erosion of the ditch. It and the burlap above is held in place with 'staples' they we drove in with a hammer. They are about six inches long with just over and inch between the legs. They went into clay just fine, but didn't go into rock so well.
Monday, October 14, was a Columbus Day, a holiday. Holidays are generally tough for day laborers. Many regular employees get the day off as a paid holiday, so there aren't as many people around who need day laborers. However, as day laborers never get paid holidays, most want to work. Worse, many libraries are closed so there is limited internet access (important to me). However, I got out helping to rip off the roof of a Salvation Army store in Salem. That made it a GOOD day. It was a flat roof on an older building and there seven day laborers and one guy from the roofing company. We each got to do many things. I also found a Kwando exercise class that is OK, not as good as the really excellent one I went to in Seattle so it may me a while to adapt.
On Tuesday and Wednesday I was back at the house in Portland built on the steep hill. This is an older section of Portland and they only have one set of sewer lines for storm and other sewage. As such, they have a problem with storms flooding the sewers and causing people's sewers to back up (never a pleasant experience). So, they require that houses have a sort of detention tank/basin to delay run off from the houses before it goes into the sewers. I helped with the filling of the dentention tank/basin. In the picture above you can see the truck delivering gravel via a boom to a conveyor belt. Here you can see the two conveyor belts taking the gravel through the house.
Here you can see the gravel falling into the tank/basin. There is also a really short video of the 'missed' gravel being shoveled by Paul back onto the conveyor belt and a longer five second video (120K, about forty seconds to download) of just the conveyor belts.
This is what the tank/basin looked like as it was being filled. There is a plastic pipe with holes in it, wrapped in silt proof cloth that drains directly into the sewer. On top of it there needs to be 12 inches of gravel (five yards of gravel that needed to be leveled). On top of the that goes 18 inches of dirt. The sides of the tank/basin have been coated with a black water proof coating.
Here is the finished result. The homeowners are encouraged to plant whatever they like in the tank basin. Getting the conveyor belts into the house and set up was quite a challenge as was getting them out.
While I was working in this house I noticed a new kind of floor beams. They are shaped a little like steel girders, but have high quality plywood at the edges with particle board center. My guess is that they are just as strong as the two by tens that would normally be used there, but much lighter and cheaper. Of course, they certainly wouldn't weather as well as a real two by ten. Here is a picture of some from underneath. If you remember, the deck outside was supported by two by eights with no external supports, they were just cantilevered out from the house.
Here you can see that to do that, they had to had more particle board to each floor beam (making it full width) and then nail two by eights to both sides. Also, the composite floor beams seem to be taller, more life two by twelve (which makes them more efficient supports).