A Messy Project

The West side bath house is one of the original buildings on camp.  It's been worked on many times over the last 60 years, but the writing is on the wall for the building.  But not yet.  With Crosscut Lodge on the precipice of completions, this summer could be the first summer that campers don't use the bath house.  It's still the most accessible restroom facility on the West side, located very close to the West Side Dining Hall.  So now we've been working to replace the most dilapidated aspect, the ceiling.

You can see what the inside of the bath house looks like, and the state of the ceiling in these pictures.  Mike Baker spent last week tearing down the ceilings, mostly by himself.  After we used the tube to take care of the insulation nicely, Mike just started ripping the ceiling down and cleaning it up from there.  It sounded absolutely miserable.  So it made quite a mess, but left us with a better idea of what we had to work with.  As you can see in the pictures below, the ceiling joists were about four feet apart, so Mike decided to put new joists in with two foot spacing.  You can also see the swimming goggles Mike tried to use at some points to keep the dust out of his face.

Now we have new ceiling joists, and supports that will help bear snow weight over the Winter.  After the joists were complete in that section, Mike Alchin put in some rolled insulation and we started in with the glassboard that will sharpen up this ceiling.  After getting one piece in, we were out of time for the weekend.  Then Mike Baker went in on Saturday and just plugged away at it with the help of whoever happened to stop by.  So now the room is almost finished.

So we'll be working on this for the next couple weeks.  In the meantime Dan Haines is still plowing through tile down in Crosscut.  Since September Dan Haines has spent his whole time at Barakel mixing mortar for hanging stone and laying tiles.  We try to visit him periodically, and he's progressing very steadily.  We're all very glad to have someone who can do such a fantastic job.

You can even see Randy trying to encourage Dan for his good work.  So we're really hustling on projects to improve camp over this Spring season.  Soon we'll see campers and workers returning, just the way it should be.