Mambo made a visit.
Author Archive for Lynn Currie
Guest post by Adrienne Pulido
“In the Heights” on Broadway is a magical bicultural, bilingual, biflavorful night of great theatre. You could tell Latinos filled the back rows last Friday night, and it wasn’t just because you could smell our doggy bags from dinner. It was because we waved our hands to “Pa’arriba esa Bandera,” we cried to “Alabanza Señor” (tribute to all Abuelas), and we were on our feet for the “I’m Home” Finale.
I had the honor of being accompanied by la líder Becky of Mambo and the infamous Nora Comstock, founder of Las Comadres who promises that she’ll bring the show down to Texas soon. “In the Heights” is good theatre in any culture, but for a Latino, it hits hard. The masterful Lin-Manuel Miranda created the show (he’s only 27 years old, chihuahua!); and with it, captured every push & tug of generations of Latinos. I flashed back so much you’d think I had some bad tequila. I could swear he knew how much I missed my abuelita, that my mom was that sexy hairdresser, and that I ditched my high school boyfriend (el más chulo) because he skipped-out on college.
We’ve heard it before & it’s true, we Latinos live parallel lives. “In the Heights” has found the thread that ties us together. It is a joyful, raucous declaration of what keeps us bound to our roots and to each other.
There is a story about the Art Contest and Tour that Mercury Mambo did for our client, Dr Pepper, in the El Paso Times. The tour appeared at local Whataburger restaurants in the city.
The Sabrosura Art Tour is the first to display Dr Pepper and Hispanic art in a mobile forum.
“It’s a great honor to join Dr Pepper in celebrating Hispanic art and culture in a way that gives the artists a new audience and patrons a new appreciation for local talent,” said Todd Coerver, Whataburger’s vice president of Marketing and Innovation”
We were having friends over for dinner, so I recently went to Spec’s to pick up some wine. When I walked in there was a big display (not the fancy kind, the kind the store would put up by stacking a bunch of boxes of wine and posting a small write-up with the price). They were featuring an Argentinian vinyard called Finca El Retiro.
While reading through all the write-ups, one of the Spec’s people came by and started telling me about the wines. He was a huge fan, raving about how there was no better wine at the price-point, going through their various taste profiles, etc.
On his recommendation, I ended up picking up several bottles of malbec, tempranillo and merlot. Some were the regular bottles (in the $8 a bottle range) and some were the reserves (in the $12 per bottle range).
Turns out, the Spec’s guy was right. These wines were amazing. The non-reserves were respectable, but the reserves, especially the tempranillo, were fantastic.
I’m no wine expert. I know what I like and I love to try new bottles. If you’d like to know the specific flavors and smells of these wines, pull up a few of the review sites on The Triple W.
After you do that, if the wine sounds like something you’d like, go buy a few bottles, you won’t regret it.
When starting any reconstruction process, the demolition comes first.
In my experience, this usually means a bunch of folks coming in with sledgehammers and knocking down the parts of the building that aren’t slated to be reused.
Very quickly.
The next step is to load all the demo’d material into a dumpster and have it hauled off. This can end up being load after load of those big construction dumpsters.
In our building, the demo took a couple of weeks.
Zaman’s workers (Zaman was our contractor from Z Works Design/Build), carefully dismantled the interior of the building. They pulled nails and screws from the wood and took the used nails/screws to the recycling plant. Then, they sorted all the boards, plywood, insulation, and lighting.
The only things that went into the dumpster were things that couldn’t or shouldn’t be re-used in any capacity. The items that we knew that we couldn’t use, but were usable by others, were either sold on Craigslist or given away on Austin Freecycle.
After seeing the demo done this way, I can’t imagine doing it any other way. It was simple and it just made sense. We paid more in labor costs, but we saved money in materials by being able to reuse perfectly good materials.
We ended up re-using the following:
- Approximately 4500 square feet of plywood.
- About 80 flourescent lights. These were of the ’shop’ variety but Zaman custom made new covers for them so they would look less shoppy and more modern.
- Insulation. The building is a steel building. The insulation that came out of it was still in great shape and re-usable. The R factor that the insulation provided was very good already.
- All interior doors
- Existing tempered and/or double-paned glass.
We ended up selling or giving away:
- An air conditioning unit
- Hay lights
- Tons of 2×4s ad 2×6s
- Sinks
- A couple of toilets
- Plumbing fixtures
- Untempered glass
We were able to recycle the following materials:
- Assorted plumbing and electrical items
- Nails and Screws
The following had to go to the landfill:
- Old drywall
- Building materials that were unusable (such as water damaged insulation)
- wiring
The original building had concrete slab floors so we didn’t have any floor coverings to dispose of.
Photos (click on the images for a better view):
Reusing the insulation as sound barriers in the conference rooms and some of the offices.
The original building had an existing mezzanine with a plywood floor that we demo’d. We were able to reuse the plywood as our subfloor in the second floor of the new construction.
A stack of 2×6s awaiting reuse.
