Alec Keeps it Professional

Recently, boss No.1 clarified that he wants me to act more in a designer-architect role than simply a supporting role. This is good, but for my German. Specifically, he wanted me to get on top of a project the office is working on in a nearby town.

So earlier this week, I grabbed the office camera and went over with Apo and boss 1 to meet the city historic preservation people since the building has listed elements. The master butcher also met us to show us around and open locked doors.

This town (well, village), has a bunch of really old buildings, and the project I am now working on has the renovation of one of them as the focus. The foundations were set in the late 1700s, although the oldest aboveground parts are probably only 200 years old. The building was at one time the bachelor lodging in town, then a guesthouse, and finally a restaurant and butcher shop, complete with pig pens in the ground floor, a slaughterhouse, and a butchers separate from the restaurant area. The ancient basement is a cavernous stone barrel vault two men tall, which dwafts the crates of wine which are stored there now.

The current Metzgereimeisteri (master butcher) who runs the restaurant is at least the third generation in his family, and some of the rooms above ground have been maintained and decorated as his parents lived.

Many other rooms, have had a lot of decay and time happen to them. I saw not one but two old cast iron stoves where you cook on metal surfaces above coal or wood fires. I had to bite my tongue to ask them to let me know whenever they have a garage sale. Got to keep it professional. The massive old timber framed roof contains three levels of attic floors, each with more rotten and missing floorboards than the last. The tile roof is shingled with terra-cotta using techniques at least as old as the foundations. Everything, absolutely everything is warped with age, it really makes me worry about how accurate our 0.000 precision autocad drawings are in relation to the wonky settling, leaning, and racking.

It really is a facinating building because it is a living testiment of time with slices readily apparent from the past 100 years. The restaurant on the ground level is actually really nice and I want to go back there with Saori sometime.