Construction Office Building Re-Roof: Fill & Download for Free

I was born in Potter Valley, California, a small rural community about 3 hours north of San Francisco on US-101. I lived there until I was 18.Our barn in Potter Valley. The house is up the hill to the left.My friends in high school had chores like taking out the garbage, doing the dishes or cleaning the bathroom. My chores sometimes included those, but during summers I was more often assigned to pull weeds in the garden. Some days my dad would ask me to move various sprinklers and hoses around in the garden while he was at work (he was self-employed as a large animal veterinarian). This was my favorite chore because it involved going out to the garden every hour or so and doing literally two minutes of work, then coming back inside to do whatever was more entertaining to me at the time. Still, I would sometimes forget, and the garden would be a muddy mess when my dad got home. He was rarely upset about this; it just meant we would have to wear rubber boots in the garden for a few days.The garden was (and still is) perhaps the most wonderful thing about that place. Some days during the summer I could just walk outside, pick a cucumber right off the vine, rinse it off, and eat it. My dad's meals are the best I've ever had - this is undoubtedly because of his skill and passion for cooking, but also because he uses fresh, home-grown ingredients at every chance. I didn't appreciate when I was younger how wonderful it is to have easy access to home-grown produce.After my freshman year of college, I went back to the farm for a summer to help out. I built fences and gates, re-roofed the pool shed (which later became my dad's office), and built an embankment to hold up part of the lawn that was falling into the pasture. We had a large garage and plenty of scrap wood from various construction (or deconstruction) projects. When my grandparents replaced the deck at their home in nearby Calpella, we took all the old 2x8s from the demolition. We used them for fixing fences, building tables, or really any other project that needed wood. I had always enjoyed manual construction; when I was 12 or so, I built an L-shaped table for my computer workstation and put it in the pool shed. I built an electric go-kart a few years later, though it didn't work as I had hoped (all it did was crash into walls). We had a good selection of hand tools, though sometimes they were old, rusty, or otherwise unusable and I'd have to improvise.Our pet cats would watch my projects, sometimes with fear and more often with amusement. We always had at least two cats, usually three or four, all outdoors. Some of them caught mice and gophers and birds, others just lazily ate the food we put out for them every day (this was another of my chores). Our cats were all very friendly.Oh, you want to pet me? Fine, but make it quick; this nap isn't going to take itself.We also had some livestock, including a horse (my dad "caught" him in the wild in college - one of his favorite stories), a llama, a couple of goats, and a herd of sheep. I think we had 20-30 head on average. Perhaps the most memorable part of dealing with sheep was docking their tails, giving them various vaccines and castrating the males. Removing most of the tail prevents some infectious diseases as well as fly strike (please don't type this into Google Image Search), but the lambs aren't happy about it when it happens. I would hold the lambs while we processed them; this was sometimes a frightening job because the lambs can be quite large and strong at just a few weeks old, and I feared they would get away from me or hurt me. They never did - thankfully, I had a very firm grip.I was involved in the local 4-H club for a few years before going to college. My sister and I raised pigs for show and sale at the county fair, which meant feeding, shoveling stalls, and "training" for the show. You can't really make a pig do anything it doesn't want to do, so my participation in the show was mostly just me following it around. Most people went to the fair to see the livestock, or the carnival, or the food vendors, or the crafts shows, but my favorite part was always the demolition derby on the final night of the week.I had never given much thought to how my life was different from those who lived in larger towns or cities. I sometimes get the impression that people who grow up in cities think less of rural places - that they're out in the middle of nowhere and there's nothing to do. This is far from the truth; there is a rich and fulfilling life to be lived in the country, and I often miss the serenity as well as the sense of community and personal achievement.

The balloon framemethod (invented by Augustine Taylor, a Chicago carpenter in the 1830s) is still most popular in the spec-built housing market. It is based on thin timber planks put together to comprise the house’s frame including the one or two floor decks and the roof rafters. It is definitely less strong than masonry construction, but far cheaper and very fast.Old multi storied apartment or office buildings only appear strong because you can notice they have really thick external walls that are load bearing. These walls need to get thicker from the roof downward since each floor carries the one below it. In such buildings, internal partitions are sturdy since they are also masonry, and some of them are also load bearing. However, such buildings show little resistance to lateral forces and can tumble down like a house of cards during an earthquake.New multi-storied buildings are supported by a steel or steel re-enforced concrete, and as time goes by their structural standards (professional and legal) become stricter. In other words they get safer. They rely on a solid internal core and sometimes on diagonal external wall lattices for extra resistance to lateral pressure and dynamic forces caused by wind or earth tremors.Such buildings may appear weak or unstable because some of them are very high and extremely slender. (See Manhattan’s new “pencil building”). Yet they are far more stable and safe than old wall bearing masonry structures.Finally, internal partitions in modern multi-family apartment buildings are made of sheet-rock – light hollow thin panels that a person can punch through with a strong fist or elbow. But try doing that to an external wall and you will end up in hospital.

I was a mischievous kid.I wasn’t a bad kid, really. I just liked to explore my surroundings! And if those surroundings happened to include drop-ceilings and high school offices, well, I could hardly be faulted for having a healthy curiosity, right?We had two big plays every year in high school — one put on by the Seniors in the fall and one put on by the Drama Club in the spring. I was in both plays my Senior year, playing a male cheerleader in Cheaper by the Dozen and Templeton in Charlotte’s Web.At some point during my high school career, the school received a large donation to build a new “math and science” wing to attach to the aging high school building. The new building would have a large library, administrative offices, a new choir room, and several classrooms for, well, math and science classes.It was pretty fancy.The library and administrative offices were on one side of the central hallway and the classrooms were down a hallway on the other. Cinder block construction ran floor-to-roof in the central hallway with a high drop-ceiling. The drop-ceiling was lower in the library and admin offices, as well as the classrooms. Because the cinder blocks ran all the way to the underside of the roof, there was no way to access the drop ceilings and climb over the walls into the offices.The doors to the library, however, were recessed from the hallway.Just by a couple of feet, sure, but the recess had its own drop-ceiling, and during some downtime in play practice for the Senior play one night, I poked my head into that drop-ceiling and discovered that the walls in that recess stopped just above the ceiling. Just like that, I had access to the library!The administrative offices were right next door, through a small conference room (the one my parents were called to when I wrote an inappropriate sonnet the year before). The adjoining door was locked, but a quick peek above the ceiling revealed clear passage as well. So I dropped into the conference room and tried the door to the office.It, too, was locked.Back into the ceiling again… This time, I made it into the office proper! I felt like a spy infiltrating an enemy base! Creeping around to the secretary’s desk to avoid the notice of anyone passing by in the halls, I slid her top-right drawer open. I don’t know what I was looking for — maybe a password to some unknown computer system like the movie WarGames — but I found something far more interesting… A key.The only locked doors that remained were for the principal, the vice principal, and a small room labeled “Records”. As the records room was closest, it was the lock I tried they key in first.And it worked!This was a small, solidly built room with three large filing cabinets and a key board on the wall. There were no drop-ceilings in this room — presumably the room was designed to withstand a fire or tornado or what-have-you. The key board had several rows of labeled hooks with keys dangling from them. There was a key for each room in the building, as well as a key dangling from a hook that was labeled “master”.This key was stamped DO NOT DUPLICATE.Of course I borrowed the key and tried it in a few of the locks. Sure enough, it opened every lock I tried. Around that time, I heard people calling for me to go through my scene, so I replaced the key and waited.After the Senior play was over, we were asked to report to the school on a Sunday afternoon to tear down the sets and clean up.I got there early.In those days, it wasn’t difficult to gain access to the school. There was no alarm system and the windows in the original building were old and didn’t always latch when they were closed. I quickly found an open window and climbed in, made my way to the new building, and retraced my steps into the office. After accessing the records room as I had done before, I grabbed the master key and drove down the road to the local Walmart.And that’s how I found out that DO NOT DUPLICATE doesn’t really mean much when it’s stamped on a key! The store associate at Walmart duplicated the key without question. I returned to the school with my freshly minted key and I used it to replace the master key in the records room without leaving a hint that I was ever there.(You know, now that I think about it, maybe that was my most badass moment in high school…)I couldn’t help myself, and I showed off to one of my friends. I let him borrow the key to make a copy for himself. He showed it to a couple of friends, and by the time the spring play rolled around, it seemed like everyone in school had their own copy of the key!Everything came crashing down when a snake in one of the science classrooms escaped, though, and a rumor floated around that it was stolen by someone with a master key to the building.Actually, the rumor was that I stole the snake, but that rumor was quickly quashed when someone tossed a rubber snake at me in gym class one day. Let’s just say that it wasn’t a particularly badass moment for me…After an assembly where we performed a bit of the spring play to encourage people to come to the performance, the principal made an announcement. “It has come to our attention that there are a number of copies of the master key to the building floating around. We are placing a fishbowl in the office to collect these keys. You may drop them off, no questions asked, at any time for the next week without fear of punishment. We are having the building re-keyed and are taking steps to ensure this does not happen again.”By the end of the week, spare keys filled two-thirds of the fishbowl!It’s pretty remarkable, in my opinion, that with as many copies of the master key floating around as there were, nothing was ever stolen. Even the snake was later found to have been hiding inside one of the lab tables after escaping its cage! The 90s were truly a different time…