Glass Block Window

I always seem to have a long list of projects to do around the house. This may have something to do with the fact that the house is over 100 years old. My goal right now is to re-do the bathroom by the end of the summer. That may or may not happen as funds are somewhat limited and we are coming into wedding season – so they will get more limited. But I can do it piece by piece and that is the plan. The first piece was to replace the window. We basically had 2 options a vinyl clad double hung replacement set or glass block. Since the window is along the tub and I want to install a shower I figured we probably would never open the double hung window and it would still allow the wood frame to possible rot from the water. So glass block it is.

I have never done glass block before, but hey that has never stopped me before why should it now?! So I started to look at Home Depot, Menards, Lowes, and other stores for supplies and to estimate the cost. While I was doing this I also researched the how to online on how the process even worked. In doing this I found another supplier that also custom made glass block windows to size you could just pop in. So I dragged the poor wife out and went to visit the glass block people. I can’t even begin to tell you how excited she was about that.

Well the glass block people had by far the best prices on the block by far. It was ½ what it was at the stores. However the price for a pre-made window was a little more that I was willing to pay. If I bought the supplies myself and spent 5-6 hours of time (2 of which I had to do with the pre-fab anyway) the cost was $250 more than just buying the supplies. I figured for $63/hour I would do it myself. So we went ahead and bought all of the supplies. I had previously used Visio to figure out the perfect arrangement of blocks to build the window in to fit the opening (glass block comes in many sizes so you can fit it to odd sizes/shapes) so I knew exactly what to buy. Again I can’t tell you how thrilled the wife was when I showed her draft after draft of the various ways to lay out the window. But hey leave it to a consultant to be thorough on such a minor detail.

Any one Saturday I got to it. The hard part was getting started. While pulling out the old window was easy, my sixth window replacement, window sills are not level, they slope outward. So I used some nails to create a something to prop the blocks up level. It seemed to work great and with the mortar surrounding the nails and now holding the blocks in place the solution worked well. Then I used spacers to set up each row. Two thirds of the way up I put in a plastic vent. It was simple matter of installing the spacers on the previous row, using a trowel to place some mortar and then placing the block in position and moving to the next. When I finished a row I pointed more mortar to make sure the bonds were good. Once the mortar dries you just break the outside parts of the spacers off and re-mortar the holes left behind.

Now this was my first time and I did make a few mistakes. I should have used more spacers. I used remnants of some spacers in place of new ones and ended up not being able to break off the parts the way I would have wanted. Second I pointed too much mortar in the seams so it isn’t evenly distributed. But This is fixable with a wire brush on a dermal, a drill bit, a bit of replacement mortar. So all in all I am pretty happy with how it came out and kinda can’t wait to do the ones in the basement and downstairs bathroom. I must be nutz to consider making glass block windows fun.

On the road again

Well after a couple of different projects it seems I am back to what I would consider normal for my job. Obviously the international travel was an exception and probably a onetime thing and the following project was 80% remote so I worked from home, but my current staffing is back to what I consider normal. I leave on Monday morning and return home Thursday night. Of course there will be times I need to stay 5 days a week and I am sure toward go-live there will be weekend work, but for the most part we will stick to a 3-4-5 schedule. That is 3 nights away from home, 4 days working at the client site, and 5 days of work (the final day is from the home office).

But it will take a little getting used to again. My corporate apartment in the UK was almost like home, more so the 3 months RG was able to live there. And home from November through March was obviously like home too! So now after a couple years of disruption I have to learn to operate on little sleep, compressed schedules, eating out of vending machines and restaurants, and dealing with hotel staff, the airlines, and rental car company. But the good news is that our lives are starting to feel the same as they did before RG left for her home stay requirement. Though I have to admit I was getting used to seeing her everyday rather that 3-4 days a week.

One perk of the job though is that our bills go down slightly when I am out of town. We only need the one car because I am not home needing to get around and the transportation at the customer site is covered so we spend less gas money, the food costs are reduced as I am taken care of on the road. Also because each day away from home is so packed with activity by the time I start to feel like I am away it is time to head home. A joke between myself and a counter part is that consultants don’t have Monday-Sunday lives. We have Got here today day, got here yesterday day, go home tomorrow day, and go home today day. Then we have in the office or work from home day and the weekend.

At any rate after some strange circumstances and a lot of different working environments I am happy to be back onto the normal weekly schedule. Though I must admit I probably wouldn’t mind being sent to Japan, somewhere in South America, or Australia for a project either!

What would we do without the Internet?

This post isn’t really about the internet but I was struck the other day on how much easier it is to get at information because of the internet, particularly when RG and I were at the bank doing some paperwork to refinance our house. During the process we needed to provide documentation on income, financial statements, tax documents, and other similar documentation. This is the third time I have applied for a mortgage so what they were asking for seemed pretty normal. What was different this time than the last two is that none of it came from a paper file. All of the documentation for the bank was electronic. On top of that I needed to produce further documentation and I was able to do it right then and there using the computer.

A few days later we had some more documents to fill out and sign arrive in the mail (which now I am wondering why we couldn’t fill them out on line) with a note requesting a few additional bank statements. Again I turned to the internet and downloaded some documents, scanned a couple others, and then emailed the package to our processer. What I find most amazing about the whole thing is that I expect to be able to do these things now as effortlessly as possible. Nine years ago when I applied for my first mortgage it was quite a different story.

Back then I remember getting the list of documents from the loan officer at the my real-estate agent’s office. Of course I had to travel home to begin the process. It took me most of the weekend to pull all the paper work together from my files. Then I had to get them all physically copied to give to her. Once that was done I physically took them back to the office and was given a follow up list of documents to get. This cycle went on for a couple of weeks and took up a good portion of my time. It was a huge hassle. Fast forward a few years and as I mentioned above all that has changed. I think the total effort I put in this time around in collecting the required documents was 1/10 or less of the old process.

I am sure these efficiencies were not even an idea when the World Wide Web was designed let alone when internet was originally conceived. But it is amazing how it has now crept into almost all processes in our lives.

Staffed, Staffed, and Staffed again

Well I have posted about this many times before, but the strangest part of my job is how we are staffed on projects. There is really no true way to make sense of it. Officially we have resource managers that are supposed to staff us. But most people end up getting staffed on their own by networking internally or working on sales projects. But either way it can take a while and there are many ups and downs to the process. Since I have been back from the UK I have been working to get a good longer term project. I have interviewed with project managers, clients, and teams for a variety of roles. Most of which I have been turned down for or the role was canceled due to project funding.

So it has been a bit of a roller coaster. Plus my current skill sets don’t match up with my positioning in the firm so it is hard to go after the roles I am supposed to go after and tend to get pulled into unrelated roles. The latest development is continues this trend. Though I think it is funny because it again shows the feast or famine nature of consulting. I has a nine week project that I knew was short term from Jan 19 to a couple weeks ago. So I never stopped trying to find a good project since I started the quest in December. Up until this week I wasn’t having much luck; too many people fighting over the same roles. But then what seems to always happens, occurred again. I went from having one project to three.

This of course doesn’t work out because I can only be in one place at a time. So the situation was kind of a mess, just as a similar situation had been a few years ago. You have three managers all trying to bring you on to their project. What made this time more amusing is that it was three possible roles on the same project but for different managers. My poor staffing manager didn’t know what was going on. But it was nice for me to have several people fighting for me. There are an awful lot of people that are on the bench not earning utilization and I am sure another round of layoffs is coming this summer and probably one after the holidays next year. So it is good to be working. I just wish the process made more sense, put people where they should be, and maybe had a little more equity.

However that said this role will be at least 6 months form me and it will probably go on for well over a year. So hopefully I won’t be facing the chopping block and this will get me through the recession. That would be nice. Even if I do have to take a connection each way to get to the client.