The Beginning of the End of My Living Room....

     To fully understand the extent of this tank build and to what kind of stress this has put on us as a family let me explain to you a few things:
                 
         1. We live in an apartment.                    
         2. It's tiny as hell...                           
         3. It's old as hell dating back to 1850's...                                
         4. There are 6 of us total living in this tiny 
             apartment...
         5. Our living room is one of the smallest rooms in the 
             house...
         6. The tank is going in that room...


     Don't get me wrong, we own our tiny little apartment and we love it. We were going to eventually throw our tenant out and renovate the entire home so that we didn't have such a tiny living room and so that we could eventually put in a larger tank. We decided however that the kids are pretty much almost grown so, having all those extra rooms someday would be a total waste so we should just enjoy the income. I guess the large tank came anyway....really early on in life too :/


     Anyway, the first thing we needed to do was make sure that when this thing went into the living room, that it didn't crash right through the floor. When I said the house was old as hell, I really meant it! However, before we bought the place nearly four years ago, the prior owners (actually I believe it was the ones before the schmuck we bought the house from) raised the entire house and poured a new foundation. Thank friggin' goodness because we live right next to the train tracks and I gotta say, this hobby wouldn't last long with the old rock foundation next to the train! I've seen some of my neighbors basements and, holy shit!  So, at least we have a new concrete foundation on our side. Nice thick wooden boards for floors throughout though...that's a whole other story :) 


     Eric (Icycoral) came down on Monday night after work and him and Chris spent the remainder of the night working on getting the floor braced. Actually, Eric braced the floor, Chris was pretty much the gopher of the night! I can't express my thanks enough to Eric (even though I am going to crack jokes in my pictures I post!) for all of his hard work. Without him, Chris says we would probably have 210 gallons of saltwater in the basement once we fill the tank. Let me take one moment to state for the record that if we do, it's your ass Eric! :D Seriously though, he did a terrific job and I can't thank him enough!! 

This is Chris pretty much doing nothing but, it looks like he's holding up the entire beam in the picture. Pretty impressive if I do say so myself. Photography by a loving girlfriend at it's best...caption by a long-time girlfriend even better :)

See, Chris pretty much watched and all night. He did a fantastic job at it though!

It's tough work watching someone do all the work. You may have to smile at the person taking the pictures for your tank build thread on Reef Central and give her the thumbs up! 

Going to to Google to see if he's been doing this right so far....

(just kidding folks....)

Once we gave Eric access to our internet that was pretty much it...he Crackbooked it for the rest of the night lol!!

     Once we were all done it was on to the next big project...getting the tank out of Kynan's house. Seeing how it's incredibly late, or early, however you'd like to look at it seeing how it's 3:30 in the morning at this point, I'll leave that post for tomorrow (or later on today). 


     Till then....