My Structural Roots

As many of you are already aware and several of you are just about to find out, I work for an architect who designs church buildings.  This probably comes as no particular shock to anybody who’s ever seen me play with LEGO (though to be fair, I really expected to be designing space craft and giant robots based on my prowess with the plastic brick).  In thinking about it in response to an interview question, I realized that I actually do have some family roots in construction.  My aunt and uncle have both been designing for years and years, one uncle on the other side used to install and service major heating and ventilation equipment and another sold tools.  My grandfathers are/were both pretty handy guys and built sheds and garages for themselves besides doing some renovation work and my dad is a pretty good example of a jack-of-all-trades, comfortable with a torch for plumbing or a hammer for framing or a set of sidecutters and a wire tester.  Nowhere was this more evident (and here I am tying into my topic sentence at the beginning) than at the old church building in Waterloo.

Dad (and Mom) spent countless hours maintaining that old beast.  It was built as a temporary structure sometime in the early 1960s and served an Anglican congregation before the Waterloo church of Christ bought it in the early 1980s.  It has since gone on to its reward (it has been torn down and replaced with student housing.  I suspect that student housing is pretty much not the Paradise that many people are hoping for after they die).  Why do I say temporary building?  The whole thing was built on what must have been an underground creek.  The basement was always wet and the sump pump ran roughly ever ten minutes.  Since the water coming in had a whole lot of mud/dirt/silt/newts in it, the sump pump would become fouled on a pretty regular basis and stop working entirely.  This would lead to four feet of dirty basement water and total destruction for anything found in the water’s path.  I dimly recall somebody taking a rubber raft down there but I suspect that I have made this up in a fit of wishful thinking.  The flipside, however, was that the basement made a fantastic lion’s den and belly of the whale for different Vacation Bible School lessons.

The main auditorium (or sanctuary if you prefer) was built on much larger versions of the concrete deck supports that people sometimes use when they can’t be bothered to dig proper post holes for their decks.  They looked a lot like the picture on the right.  Due to the uncertain nature of the soils underneath, these concrete pier deallies had been sinking into the ground slowly for some years while the Anglicans owned the building.  When we bought it, we replaced their red vinyl kneeling cushions with large, heavy, oaken pews.  I know the kneeling cushions were of red vinyl because for some reason we kept them under the auditorium instead of throwing them away.  The weight of the pews drove the outside edges of the auditorium down at a significantly faster rate than the centre beam and so the room had a pronounced and noticeable inverted V shape to the floor.

The first plumbing repair I ever did was at that building.  After a potluck one Sunday, the sink in the kitchen backed up terribly and took ages to drain.  I looked under the counter and found that somebody in their wisdom had repaired a past leak with black electrical tape which had over time slipped in between the edges of the crack and effectively sealed off the drain (I had to sift through quite a lot of lukewarm, greasy water in order to get it cleared out and draining into a bucket so we could finish the dishes).  I looked at it for a while and decided I could fix it so off I trotted to Home Hardware and bought pipe cement, a new p-trap and a proper brass sink fitting (which is what the electrical taper of years past ought to have done).  I borrowed a wrench and took an afternoon and got it put back together properly for about eight months until the building was sold.  It was time well spent because now I know exactly what to do when the sink at my house breaks (expecting this to happen soon).