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These informal reports, filed every couple weeks by Roshi (and e-mailed to interested members), are meant to provide snapshots of what's happening at Chapin Mill, plus the who, how, when, and where of it.
Spent last Tuesday continuing on drywall installation, now in the lower floor, in the 1,100-sq.-ft. temporary zendo, which will ultimately be the exercise room. Our crew of five, all residents of Chapin Mill except me, has had enough experience now to work together smoothly without much talk. And what gratifying work it is, to see the skeletal walls of vertical studs progressively covered with smooth drywall (a.k.a. sheetrock, or gypsum). We now have more than half the walls of this room up, and it's one of the last rooms to be finished.
But "finished" doesn't mean really finished. Next comes the "mudding," in which a kind of gray playdough is applied to the seams between the sheets of drywall, as well as to the slight cavities where the screws went in, to create a completely smooth wall.
Which then has to be sanded even smoother before being painted.
Mudding takes skill. Lou says that people in the trade often spend years apprenticing at it. So he and John Pulleyn, our Project Manager, have decided that for the time being it's best for all mudding at Chapin Mill to be done by the three who are currently most practiced at it: them and Helen Fuller.
Helen did a good deal of it in her native New Zealand, where, by the way, she also worked for years in the costume department for the popular "Xena: Princess Warrior" show ("Lots of silicone used there," she reports).
Until we raise the funds to build Phase II, which will include the permanent(?) zendo, we'll be doing zazen in this sprawling room. With an early windfall or two we could be sitting in the "official" zendo within a couple of years, but it could also take much longer than that. So it is with more than the usual care that we are drywalling here. Every mar in the lower areas of the drywall could provide the raw material for extravagant makyo--tigers, snakes, elephants, and denizens of all the other realms as well.
Recently we've run into a couple of bumps (literally) in the construction. First it was the bow in the wall that Lou noticed, just inside the main entrance, in the long corridor looking out at the future central courtyard. In the most visible, first-impression section of the wall, that is. Although some would defend it as a Zen bow, it had to be redone, no question. A call to the contractor, Joe Condidorio, brought the framers back, at their expense, and now it is as straight as--well, as a taut bowstring.
The other problem we're encountering is squeaks in the floor. "Every time we fix one," Tom growled, "another pops up." Sounds like long-term Zen practice. We're still trying to nail down the cause, but Lou swears that they'll all be silenced eventually. After all, we've endured enough floor squeaks at Arnold Park to last us a lifetime. "Whatever it takes," he vows.
Erratum: Those dining hall cathedral ceilings described in the last Dispatch as 30
feet high are actually 15 feet high!
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