Sunday, June 30, 2019

An updated tower

When the work for painting the metal on the roof started last year, casually, some "older" metal suffered of the powerful washing that was performed. Well, in theory that is just a mere coincidence, but we are rather convinced that the reason why some serious holes appeared was surely not just because it was time...

Nevertheless, since our idea was to have metal sheets in titan (rheinzink), we agreed with the plater that we would have to wait this spring to have the work done, once because of course they were occupied but also because the rheinzink can be worked only when the temperature is over 10 degrees.

The metal was patched by the roof painter for surviving the winter. 
We booked so that they'd come in June and so they did. They remove most of the old metal and while I confirmed that they were going to use rheinzink, they stated that they were going to use, to my total surprise, galvanized metal.
Galvanized metal is not to be recommended to be used anymore, the roof experts say, as the passivation layer make the surface too perfect for being painted.
But this is nothing strange with the contractors. You agree on one thing and it turned out to be what they want.
"Cultural" metal sheets
Before having something we really don't want, I managed to suggest to use "cultural" metal sheets, which is metal sheet that has a prepainted layer at production. 
Luckily, not only they agreed with this and they had the material in their shed, so that is what it should be.

The point of the tower, between the roof and it, where the metal needed to be changed
Eventually, everything was done and the work concluded.
So, now the roof should last with this patch even longer (I wonder why the first roof company didn't fix it).
The metal patched seen from above.

The rods are up

Summer is here and thanks to some weeks of holidays, there are some progresses in some of them many projects that we start (and barely finish).
Let's give an update about what's happening with the curtain rods in the "red room" (also known as piano or tv room).

We are at the point where the rods are up, I have oiled them and we need to:
1) choose the curtain textile
2) buy all the accessories (rings, tie-backs, ...)
3) have the blacksmith coming here and cut the curved rod, since it is too long
4) fix the wall, as it got scratched (typical...) when the rod was put up

Curved rod, left side

Curved rod, right side
Once all is done, we will also add the quite beautiful knobs.

The knobs at the forge
The wall fasteners became pretty good at the end, but there is a little long history behind them.
The idea was to have some "jugend" inspired design. Something was defined during last summer, but that got lost in time and space.
I spent a quite rushed hour with the blacksmith trying to find something feasible and trying to remember how it was supposed to look, but that didn't work out exactly smoothly.
We came up with an idea, but that was not approved as it was too messy to have done in such a small piece.

A first attempt for the wall fasteners
Considering the space limitations, our blacksmith had to use a bit of creativity and make more trials, before, after a ping pong of pictures on Whatsapp, we gave our approval.
How shall we do this??

There, this should work! And in fact, it did!