A Bridge To Somewhere

One of the odd (some would say charming) things about this house is that it is built on the side of a hill. There is nothing new here and our efforts to keep the hill in place and to keep the house attached to it and to terra firma below have been chronicled in this blog to some length.

Of course we could not let all that great hillside go to waste and we are capping it with a very nice deck for future use. Getting to the deck is a bit of a challenge because, as things now stand, one would have to scale not one, but two massive vertical concrete walls to get up there and while this would be a very spirited exercise for Jenn and I, getting guests to do the same and hauling wine and a BBQ grill at the same time would be a bit too much to ask.



This is why, from the very beginning, the design called for a bridge connecting the master bedroom to the top of the hill directly across and why we have, up to this point anyway, had a pair of french doors opening on the abyss from the back of the master bedroom.



This is what the original bridge design looked like in the plans:



What is actually getting built, however is far from a dainty wooden bridge. The team began bolting the main steel structure of the main bridge to the back of the bedroom today:






And although we are not quite there yet, the view out of the master bedroom french doors is a little bit less abyssal, and a little bit more bridge like.



And just to get the sense of the mass of this thing, here is what one of the beams look like from the end:



And here is where this bridge is bolted to the aforementioned massive concrete retaining walls:




If there is anything more beautiful that lots of concrete, it's lots of steel. I get giddy just thinking about it.

Can't wait to see what this looks like by the end of the week.