In the Brick House there is a wall and that wall needed to come down. Well, part of it did anyway. In order to have the 'mall' flow the way that it nees to there was need to put a passage way in a brick wall. Well, we could always continue to use the womens bathroom as a hallway but it would prove less effective and there may be one or two ladies that might get offended by that. So after having an engineer offer his opinion to the guy that was originally going to help us with the wall we faced a frightened crew. Yes there was fear that the building would come down and this has caused some delay in our progress.
Last week I met with Jason who has been helping us with some of the work and we discussed the plan he and Robert (a friend of the folks from New Harmony who is also helping with some things - his brother is the engineer) came up with. I will not relay it here as doing so will put me to sleep for sure. Suffice to say it was major overkill. I shared with Jason some of the thoughts pops and I had on the matter and he seemed to think it would work. At that precise moment I looked over at the 4 ft door on the side wall and noticed that it happend to be done the same way I had just suggested. Funny, the building was still standing and it was carrying more load then the wall we were needing to cut. I am sure this is all very interesting.
Well, today we simply made it happen. We were pretty confident that our plan would work. I had picked up needed iron for the header last week and today we took down a wall. It is a thing of beauty. As I got into it I found that much of what they were fearing didn't exist and the project was a lot simpler then it was made out to be. The iron headers worked great and the demolition of the wall was quite fun. There was a moment when I blasted through some brick with the sledge hammer and it went through a little quicker then I anticipated so I took a small chunck of flesh out of a knuckle. I had to clean it and what not but it is fine. Back to work and the demo is done. We have some supports to put in tomorrow still and a little concrete to pour but other then that, it is in there. So relieved.
Dave - personal parable time. Sometimes in life we can get so carried away by planning and analyzing that we fail or even fear to do the work. A favorite quote of mine comes from Elder F. David Stanley of the 70 - he served in the Africa Area Presidency back when I was on mission. Anyhow, he said in the April 1993 General Conference the following relative to work: "Say and sit will never replace diligently do". With this project we had a simple plan to begin with and then someone else offered to lend a hand. We thought that was a good thing. It was, and very much appreciated too. Anyhow, we kind of let go of the project and were relying on someone else who somehow blew it up to much more then it needed to be. It became some complex that it was frightening and the result was that it stalled out. We had to keep progressing and so we acted. We were uncertain what would happen today when the cutting started. There certainly was the possibility that the building would come down but until we did we would not know. And so we cut and we secured and we cut and we hammered until we accomplished what we set out to do.
You know I could insert my favorite all time poem at this point but I will not recite the entire thing. Perhaps just a line or two -
There are thousand to tell you it cannot be done.
There are thousands to prophesy failure.
There are thousands to point out to you one by one
The dangers that wait to assail you.
But just buckle right in with a bit of a grin
Just take off your coat and go to it
Just start to sing as you tackle the thing
It cannot be done, and you'll do it.
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