Arrebita! Porto: Who needs a gym...

...if you have a construction site?

Last Wednesday it was finally time to let the drawings be drawings and to get our hands dirty. Literally!

The workers of our partner Envolvente started the mounting of the scaffold in the morning. By the end of the day we could marvel at the yet finished construction.

Due to safety regulation we still need to fix a net to the scaffold this Tuesday. So it is time to get up there for the first time and believe us, our dear Reboleira 42 never looked higher!

Does anyone suffer from vertigo?

While the mounting of the scaffold was well underway, Weber our main partner for the facade supplied us with material for the facade as well as for the interior walls and floors. Since, about 100 bags à 25 kg were obviously bit too much for our bikes, we were quite lucky to have Selidomus as a partner for the transportation to the building site.

Given the fact that our Rua da Reboleira is more of a small alley than a street, it was impossible to park in front of our building. Therefore, we needed to carry each bag separately from the street down to our building. Besides the driver of Selidomus and a handcar, the workers of Envolvente were kind to help us. Considering, that we could only carry one bag at a time whereas some of them even managed three, we were more than grateful. Who knows, how long it would have taken otherwise. Now the bags are neatly stacked in our neighbours ground floor, because the one in our building is as you might know non-existent. Thanks to Sr. José Loureiro, who lets us occupy space in his house.

In case you might wonder, why we did not store them in our first floors:

The week was not over yet. More material ahead!

Despite Good Friday, we headed to the building site to take delivery of the wooden beams. These laminated beams supplied by our partner Portilame are used for the reconstruction of the ground and 2^nd floor as well as the reinforcement of the 1^st floor.

If we had already considered the bags of mortar to be heavy, the beams certainly taught us better.

While we carried the few smaller beams with two to three people, we just managed the rest with the help of the Rita and Daniel. And we are talking about ONE SINGLE beam carried by the seven of us! We guess, we chose quite a symbolic day for this task, as many pedestrians commented with a chuckle. Again, the help of our Partner Topdomus who delivered and whose workers dealt with the major part of the beams was indispensable. Thanks a lot, especially since it was a public holiday.

Beams unloaded, let's do this.

Sitting on the beams, it was all very well for us to laugh!

…until we realized, that two people were not enough to carry one.

Last but not least, we are going to unravel our little mystery about the colour of the windows on facebook! Our partner Gercima for the renewal of the windows dropped by to let us pick the colour, since all red are not created equal.

We asked you on Facebook: what color would you choose?

And...drum roll...we decided in favour of 3, which is RAL 3011 semigloss. Due to our partner, they will probably be ready to get installed in the beginning of May.