Future me: "This place is totally different now! I remember what it was like back in the day when the sidewalk was only 20" wide. Before this 28" super-highway was installed! Pssssh."
...and we drove out to Washington Township to see the new house he and Erika had bought! They'd just gutted it and had just begun the process of framing out a new floorplan!
On Thursday afternoon we came home and found a giant hole cut into the middle of our living room! Construction to turn our apartment and the one below into a giant duplex by adding a spiral staircase had begun!
When we got back to our apartment, we found that the floor in our living room had been marked up to be opened up! Our landlord's taxes turned out to be way higher than he expected, so he needed to turn our apartment and the one below us into one uber-apartment in order to reduce the number of occupancies in the building! We debated trying to find people to share our new duplex with, but in the end we decided to just find a new apartment. Sad!
After the sun became unbearable (aka: 5 minutes later), we went back into the hotel and check out some of the huge models they had in the lobby showing some of the other huge construction projects that are going to be built on man-made islands off the coast of Abu Dhabi.
To give you an idea, here's a close up. In this one tiny portion of the model, there are more than 20 buildings taller than 20 stories! They're basically planning to build something similar in size to the ISLAND OF MANHATTAN on man-made islands by dredging sand up from the bottom of the gulf).
Construction in Dubai happens so quickly that roads sometimes appear or disappear seemingly overnight. On the drive over to the mall, the desert was littered with all sorts of random "road flotsam" like this. Not sure if this one in particular was a sign of a road to come or a relic of a road left behind.
The Construction-Themed Holiday Shot. (At this point, we'd been renovating our loft space for the last 6 months and one of these seemed appropos.) Dzija with googles and expanding foam insullation, Amy with extension cord, Barlow with dry-wall gun and helmet, me with cordless impact nail gun.
The ceiling in our loft was covering layers of peeling paint that would constantly flake off and fall all over everything. We had no choice but to scape the entire motherfucking ceiling. By hand. Dzjia prepares to start on the ceiling in what will become his room.
BONEHEAD MISTAKE #2: In order to fit two levels inside, we needed to make the first floor ceiling's shorter than code...which meant we'd need to trim about 8" off of all of the pre-fab door we bought. I took my door off the hinges, measured it and cut it, only to realize that measure from the wrong side. So when I re-hung the door it looked like this.
Here's the workshop that we setup in the "front area." See that giant stack of 2' x 6's...they were all handed up through the windows one at a time. Ughh.
