Day 6 on the Mall
Our small but Dedicated team eating lunch on the ZEROW's porch. There were about twenty free box lunches from Dell -- so we shared with other workers!
Today, Team ZEROW was composed of 6 students, 2 faculty leads, and 1 wonderful sponsor/volunteers on site. With our large construction done and our 1st construction crew back in Houston, we are now eagerly awaiting the arrival of our next wave of students, who will get to DC tomorrow evening at around 11 pm (they will leave studio early, take a 6:45 flight out of Houston, and hope to make the metro before it closes for the night).
Today we had more technical problems that were unexpected– the circuits for the lights were not installed properly in Houston, so we had a lot to figure out. Some wires were pulled out of the wall, mainly in the light cove wall. As a result, there were lots of activities inside the house and we couldn’t do too much touch-ups with the interiors.
We had several inspections and passed some. We had to tape the handrail cables ends with silver tape for children safety issues and also filed the steel bar edges.
Our Solar Clothes Dryer, aka clothesline, is up!
The Rice media relations rep from Houston, Jessica Stark, came and interviewed some students. We are so glad she was able to join our team in DC! She has been helping us out for the last 9 months or so, and has been a great resource for us, coordinating and scheduling interviews, and making sure that the greater Houston community is up to speed with what we are up to!
Nonya, one of our our faculty leads, and Jonathan, her husband and a wonderful sponsor/volunteer, arrived on the Mall in the afternoon and immediately started to help. Jonathan helped with the AC problem: one of the mini-splits wouldn’t turn on, but after a couple of hours it was up and running.
Meanwhile, Nonya and the interiors team installed the plastic walkway for the tour. Though the team is still waiting for a democratic decision as to whether or not to keep it, we installed it anyway so we can pass the inspection first.
Installing our walkway covering; 100,000+ guests walking through your house can do some pretty damaging things to your bamboo flooring, or so we hear.
More from the site:
- The fire alarm was installed!
- The pipe that leaked yesterday was fixed, but that resulted in some major bathroom wall teared, mainly under the cabinet and around the mirror. We can’t paint the bathroom wall until tomorrow (Wednesday).
- We cleaned up the solar panels with windex and swiffer and had our fall arrest equipments on!
- The solar water tube started to get installed (one of them broke yesterday and they got one replaced today).
- The extra ramp was finished (for the tour).
- We scrubbed more decks with bleach and scraped paint, and cleaned the corrugated aluminum.
- We had our last water supply coming today, we didn’t have anymore space so we filled our wheel barrel. (-:
- The outbox around the water tank and pump was completed, and painted with a grey-base. THERE IS A BIG SURPRISE IN TERMS OF HOW THIS IS GOING TO BE FINISHED. GET EXCITED! Pictures of our great surprise will be posted tomorrow!
We started producing electricity (enough to power 4 laptops and 2 TV’s according to Roque) and ran the monitoring system through our laptop.
All other teams are finishing well. We are so excited to see everyone’s houses come together! There is such excitement on the Mall right now, and we are all a part of this momentum that keeps building and building!
As three of the girls are leaving, the team is excited to welcome Nonya and Jonathan, and the big group coming tomorrow night. In the meantime, there’s so much work to be done as the pencils down is 8 PM sharp.
See more from Day 6 through the eyes of Diana, our awesome interiors gal / photographer of the day!
