The Construction Site

Greetings and welcome to Dinosaur Bear!

This post features special guest consultants Pigsten and Broli. I bring in these two to offer up their expertise on a certain construction site that we used to live next to. Unless you’re a newcomer to Dinosaur Bear then you’ll probably know that I’m referring to the site directly across the street from our residence in Iceland. Yes, that construction site was essentially ubiquitous with our time in Reykjavík – so much so, in fact, that I mentioned potentially writing a post about it in my very first post about Iceland.

The story of our Sæmundargata construction site is one of enjoyment, frustration, and even surprise. See, when we moved into our Reykjavík apartment we had no idea we were going to be living right across the street from a large construction site. We knew about the (further away) domestic airport, but not the construction site which was less than a stone’s throw distance from us. So, when we first walked into our apartment back in August of 2017 we saw it.. right there across the street.. a giant gaping mud pit with a fence around it. I clearly remember that my first thought was “Oh boy, here we go.” Turns out that the construction site would pale in comparison to my loud arse neighbors, but I didn’t know that at the time as all the children around me had yet to move in yet.

Still, we also knew that the construction site was going to be a constant part of our Icelandic existence – after having lived in what was by most accounts a construction site back in Boston (major facade repair to our building that blocked off our windows for months and continuously filled our apartment with brick and mortar dust) – but we also knew that there wasn’t much we could do about it, so we just accepted that we were now neighbors to a construction site. In fact, some of the very first photos we took in Iceland prominently feature the construction site.

It didn’t take long for a certain little dinosaur to take to the construction site – and by “take to” I mean “assume control of.” Clifford apparently pulled strings – as Clifford is wont to do – and secured a position for Pigsten as a foreman on the site as part of his “school.” We had all ventured to Iceland for school in varying forms so Pigsten was no exception!

Master of all he surveys.

Pigsten would later be joined by quite a few assistants and friends, but at the start it was just him and his trusty machine – gifted long ago by a one Grandma Meem. Oddly enough, shortly after starting his project Pigsten found one last ancient piece of gum in the innards of his manly-machine – he ate it, gross, but totally not surprising.

Anyways, in this post what I would like to do is a share a “picture book” of the Sæmundargata construction site. The photos will be, by and large, chronological. They are also mostly from yours truly – with a few photos provided by the property manager that I found online thrown in as well. I had a lot of source material to work with, as believe it or not we ended up taking just shy of 400 photos of the site. Now, don’t get me wrong, a lot of those photos were us just taking photos from our windows or balcony, and weren’t specifically of the construction site (e.g., if we wanted to take a photo of the outdoors, the site was in it 90%+ of the time just because of its size and proximity to us). However, we did take a lot of photos with the focus being the site itself.

I am not a construction expert and while I have worked briefly on construction sites in the past, I can’t claim to know most of the ins-and-outs of the process. I am, however, now quite versed in the state of living next to a construction site – and this post will chronicle some of that experience. In many ways the construction site was as much a part of our living in Iceland as was our time at Háskóli Íslands, which is fitting considering that the university owned the site. Given the university ownership it probably isn’t surprising that the site was destined to be (much needed) student housing, but it was also part of a larger science/research area expansion. For example, this next photo you can see a second hole further in the background – that was going to be one of the research buildings.

But, for the most part, SB and I chose not to look into the specifics of the project (though they are available online – in Icelandic of course) because we liked the element of surprise – very, very slow surprise, but surprise nonetheless. So, when we first moved in we got to watch them digging a giant pit in the ground, and that’s when Pigsten took command.

For much of the earlier periods the site was punctuated by lots of digging, more digging, and then spreading some rocks.

These multiple rocks layers – that would eventually come to form the foundation of the site – were mostly brought in by a seemingly never-ending array of semi-trucks.

This layering process continued onward and upward, with frequent and ongoing fights against pooling rainwater being the only apparent setback.

The manner in which they did the layering didn’t always make sense to SB and I, but they focused almost exclusively on that process for quite some time.

At this point the “on-site crew” really only consisted of Pigsten, two operators, and the occasional supervisor.

At one point the larger Hitachi suffered a malfunction or was simply sent elsewhere, either way Pigsten wasn’t pleased about the lack of his biggest excavator.

He quickly replaced it with another one, which, while smaller was still good enough for the task(s) at hand.

Around that time they expanded the site a bit over towards the side street (Eggertsgata).

On the whole progress seemed fairly slow around that point, though there were a lot of rainbows around that time of year so maybe they were distracted with the gold hunt.

The rainbows also meant a lot of rain though, and sure enough there was far more totally cloudy and rainy days than there were sunny ones.

Not that Pigsten let that stop his progress though. 😛

Still, we hadn’t yet hit that totally depressing part of the year yet, so there were some sunny days intermittently through that period of work.

At that point the weather wasn’t quite yet a ongoing setback, and the biggest disturbances to the work were the dreaded street-cleaners (Pigsten seems to have inherited Clifford’s utter disdain for them).

Yet even with the occasional street-cleaner to deal with Pigsten kept up his progress on what was then still just a giant muddy hole.

It was around that time that the smaller machines started to trickle in, along with a slightly larger ground crew.

It was also around that time that the first real noisy period began – and it is here that I must pause to tell you about the ole’ jackhammer.

It started innocently enough, the Hyundai switched out its bucket for a jackhammer one day and started hammering – very loudly and constantly – on a rock sheet.

It hammered, rain or shine (which is to say mostly rain), without fail until it had a nice “little” busted up rock pile to sit on.

But it didn’t stop there. It kept going, hammering on rocks unseen to the untrained eye.

Pigsten, ever vigilant, even watched over the hammering on Sundays – a newly added day to the work schedule for the site.

Yes, the hammering became a constant part of life for us. It would start around 7am and continue until well into the evening.

Here’s the thing though, it didn’t really bother me. I think there are two reasons for this, first – it was sort of a constant and rhythmic noise. As such, over time my brain was able to tune it out – if only somewhat. Second, and more important, it pissed my neighbors off. This brought me great joy as my neighbors were largely late-teen and early-twenty somethings who would have parties until 3-4am and blare music. Basically, they had determined that it was OK to scream (yes scream) constantly and to play ludicrously loud music (and then lie to the landlord about it, and the landlord of course believed them over the foreigners) until 4am, BUT because poor-little-baby partied until 6am it was NOT ok in their minds for the construction site to start making noise at 7am.

How do I know it pissed them off? Well, for one they fumed about it on Facebook. They also fumed about it in class (I don’t think any of my direct neighbors were in any of my classes, but one classmate was in a building adjacent to us and he bitched about it). They complained to the construction company (ISTAK). They complained to the city. They also wrote a letter to the landlord claiming the rent should be lowered because of the noise. They were utterly denied on all fronts (much to my pleasure, though cheaper rent would have been nice). Basically, I received great joy at the babies getting woke up in the morning after keeping the few people in the building who had some semblance of responsibility in their lives from sleeping soundly.

Pigsten, for his part, responded to the noise by bringing in even more equipment.

And, despite all the bitching and moaning, the hammering continued.

It continued at really most hours of the day to be honest.

Pigsten was quite proud of his growing crushed rock pile, and even gave nightly progress reports to us.

Of course night itself was no obstacle to Pigsten, and the hammering continued then too.

There was a brief pause to the hammering during a few days of especially bad weather – so bad in fact that the perimeter fence collapsed.

If I remember correctly it happened on a Saturday and as such it took awhile for them to come fix it – and by that time pieces were all over the road.

However, not one to let the rain stop him, Pigsten had his crew start cleaning the site up even before the storms had fully passed.

Tristen found the whole affair quite “manries.”

Then, early the next morning, the hammering returned.

And, as before, continued well past dark (which, in fairness, wasn’t saying much at that point).

This was the norm for quite some time: hammering, moving, and more leveling.

Eventually the smaller machines started appearing more frequently – a first sign of some coming shifts for the project.

Of course shortly after that the snow started falling.

This brought in some temporary construction assistance from a one Valentino, Polar Bear.

For a good while after that I’d say the construction site spent more time blanketed in snow than it did without it.

For the most part the presence of the snow was no issue for Pigsten though.

The only real downside of the snow and colder weather seemed to the be the nightly return of the ice pockets, but even that didn’t seem to be too much of an issue.

There were, however, a few snow storms which got bad enough that the site came to a standstill for hours at a time – much to Pigsten’s dismay.

Now, Pigsten being the tyrant(a-saurus) that he is, he always made the workers make up that missed time as soon as the storm was gone.

In Pigsten’s view they were making good money to get the job done – and storms were no excuse.

Around this time they were nearing completion of the “layering” aspect of the pit – something that snow probably didn’t help a whole lot with.

There were previous several points at which we had thought they were done layering, but Pigsten had different plans.

He was also pretty insistent that they work the full day, even when visibility was an issue.

When things got really snowy, Pigsten brought in cold-weather expert Valentino to help manage the site.

Valentino’s presence (with his Alaska training) was enough to ensure the site kept going, even on snowy nights.

A lot of times the snow didn’t actually stick around that long.

During these “low-snow” periods the site was punctuated with lots of ground-crew work.

We knew things were changing when one day Pigsten had a more permanent and heavy-duty series of barricades put up around his site.

These barricades had to be installed to Pigsten’s precise specifications – so he used his (favorite) CAT machine to get the job done with precision.

The installation of the barricades was the dawn of a new area for the site.

At that point things were quiet for a few nights as the crew began to transition to the next stage.

When the survey crew came in we had a pretty good idea that the pit itself was complete.

Shortly after that the first of Pigsten’s offices started rolling in.

Pigsten also completed his side-dig area around the same time.

There were a few more sporadic trucks over the next few days, but most of the effort seemed to have shifted into preparing the site for a much larger crew.

After a few days of relative downtime there was another burst of work, and the early-morning hours returned.

Steam rising from the geothermal waters of Hljómskálagarður.

Also, just as the next wave of work was starting, Broli came to live with us!

Pigsten and Broli became fast little-dino friends, and unsurprisingly Pigsten was quick to begin teaching Broli the proper ways of running a construction site.

Around this time Pigsten expanded his personal crew quite a bit, with the arrival of new employees such as the viking warriors, Ganesha, and Grýla.

This crew would end up becoming a permanent display on our window ledge.

With expanded crew at hand, Pigsten began the construction of the large central crane that would come to rise over the site.

The crane building process was quite extensive – and, like most of the site – seemed to occur in spurts.

However, with Pigsten at the helm the work progressed ever onward.

Icing and flooding was an issue for a while – a factor which probably contributed to the slower pace.

Then, because Iceland can never make things easy, we got some bad snow storms.

With Valentino as the onsite expert things didn’t stop – but even with his help they still slowed to a crawl.

To make matters worse the snow just kept coming, and while there were “lighter” days the period as a whole was really just one giant blizzard.

The snowfall, coupled with the very early onset of darkness made things quite difficult.

As a result there were some days where work just couldn’t safely be accomplished.

The the biggest issue was visibility.

There were a lot of days/nights where even the powerful construction lights (which were oh so annoying at night and ruined our ability to see the northern lights) were just blurry globes in the snow.

Pigsten was very annoyed on these occasions. 🙂

But, when the storms did pass Pigsten was ready and waiting to go!

He was even nice enough to share a yummy tomato with his personal crew (and once even got pizza for the entire ground grew too – he isn’t all bad as a boss).

Now, despite the reprieve from the bad streak of weather Iceland wasn’t quite done with the snow yet, so we still had a few days that got pretty bad.

The intermittent bad days were generally not quite as intense or long-lasting as the bad streak though, so Pigsten generally recovered his progress quite quickly.

In fact there were even some nice semi-sunny days in there!

Pigsten used those days to make a lot of progress on his crane installation.

Actually, Pigsten got just a little obsessed with cranes there for awhile.

He probably would have kept putting up more and more cranes if not for the arrival of his first round of rebar.

Unfortunately for Pigsten his arrival of rebar was quickly met by the return of some Iceland-tier bad weather. So bad that we woke up to this one morning:

That is generally a view of the construction site – that morning, not so much.

That brought the site to a standstill, but fortunately it didn’t last too long. The bad news is that because the snow-capable weather didn’t last long, it also melted very quickly. That created its own problems.

Yes, Pigsten was way less than pleased about the massive flooding of his site.

To make matters worse, the weather just kept the precipitation coming – meaning that the flooding eventually just shut down the site for a bit.

Broli convinced Pigsten that the best thing they could probably do was wait, so wait they did.

However, it was right around that time that we took our trip to Greenland, and so Pigsten tasked his grew with having the site cleaned up by his return. Fortunately (for them) they achieved their task by the time we got back.

With his site dry once again, Pigsten returned to his crane construction.

The good news there is that we got lucky with a streak of a nice weather – a streak that Pigsten took good advantage of.

They made more progress on his central crane in 2 days than they had in two months!

Of course the crane wasn’t the only aspect of the site making progress, there were lots of areas of the site receiving renewed and newfound attention.

It was also at this point that Pigsten installed that really bright light to the left-of-center in this photo. We were not amused – Pigsten was.

With his crane complete, Pigsten then moved into the full-on rebar and concrete installation phase.

This phase ended up taking quite some time, even with help of the big crane.

The good news is that the daylight hours were increasing day-by-day.

All the daylight made for good concrete-pouring conditions, or at least so said Pigsten.

The street in front of our apartment was basically cement-truck HQ for a while, and the street was closed for a whole day once.

Pigsten used all sorts of fancy construction site technology to make sure his concrete was properly installed in spite of the Icelandic weather.

Not that Iceland didn’t at least try to make things difficult, such as when it snowed right after he had poured concrete.

But, if it wasn’t obvious by now, Pigsten is persistent, and so he just kept on layering that concrete – rain or shine.

Concrete days started very early and tended to go decently late, but there was a lot of work to do so that’s no surprise.

After the concrete was poured the secondary crew would come in to get it perfected to Pigsten Standards.™

Broli liked watching them slide around all over the concrete.

For a time the concrete work was what made up the bulk of the day, with the weather trying to make things difficult when it could.

The street-cleaners also tried their best to disrupt things, but Pigsten wasn’t having any of that.

As things warmed up the snow gave way to ever-increasing amounts of rain (record breaking, in fact) which meant crummy work conditions, but generally nothing that shut the site down.

The only real problem was high winds, especially when they were trying to move things around with a crane.

Pigsten seemed pretty nervous when the wind really knocked his stuff around, but Broli made sure he had some nice warm tea to soothe his nerves.

After the base layer of concrete was complete they started working their way upward for the first time.

Pigsten had to oversee a lot during those days, as some geothermal components were also being installed into the concrete.

As foreman, Pigsten also had to deal with sometimes lackadaisical crews, such as this event where five workers stood and looked at a ladder for nearly an hour without accomplishing a single thing.

The good news is that Pigsten runs a tight ship, so “lazy meetings” were not the norm.

Plus, at that point we were getting a lot more daylight hours, so it made it harder to hide from “the boss.” 🙂

The daylight didn’t always equate to sunshine but it was still better than the dark-and-snowy days that they had dealt with earlier.

On the whole progress was pretty smooth during that period.

To untrained eyes such as SB and I’s it didn’t seem like a whole lot changed from day to day, though I am sure Pigsten would beg to differ.

Iceland did have one last wrench to try to throw into the machine though, with a late season snow.

Of course Valentino was more than willing to work overtime in snowy conditions, so it wasn’t too much of a setback.

The snow didn’t stick too much, but it did fall for a good while.

The site itself mostly just got wet, though the surrounding ground did maintain a dusting of snow on and off over the next few days.

Visibility even diminished a few times, but never to the point that things had to be shut down entirely.

After that round of snow days passed winter seemed to finally relent – at least in regards to snow, not so much the clouds.

But, as usual, Pigsten kept on keepin’ on and the site continued to progress.

Pigsten even put a sign explaining what was on going, not that I could read it or anything.

The next big transition was when they started moving to the “ground level” – as up until that point that had been doing mostly foundational work and work in the basement/parking garage (which would be under the building – a nice feature considering the limited parking in the area).

We also began to transition into period of 24 hours of light around that time, and to Pigsten’s credit he didn’t make his crew work 24/7. 🙂

They did, however, not seem to be working quite fast enough for ole’ Pigsten at that point.

For once the weather wasn’t too much to blame – and I don’t think Pigsten liked the “slow pace” of the springtime construction.

As such, he reinstalled one of his secondary cranes.

That, coupled with more daylight, seemed to bring things more back in line with where he wanted to be.

Even to an untrained eye this particular part of the project did seem to be fairly slow-going.

A lot of it seemed to be due to the nature of the foundational and floor construction, which requires setting periods for the concrete.

Thus, expansion across the open sections was slow and methodical.

Pigsten decided to speed things up a bit by focusing on multiple areas of the site at once.

This, in turn, allowed things to move along a bit more smoothly – even if it was sometimes confusing to SB and I.

Still, this period of construction lasted for quite a while – though as you can see in the next photo they simultaneously began working on the ground floor units while still installing the lower floor/ceiling.

It also saw a lot of construction traffic on our street – and I think there for awhile it was closed at least once a week if not more.

Pigsten liked having them working in the street though, as it made them easier to keep an eye on. 🙂

When you’re as detail oriented as Pigsten, every action needs to be closely examined for accuracy.

Still, as mentioned, Pigsten wasn’t too bad of a boss. He paid them lots of money and let them have at least one day on the weekend (sometimes 😛 ) he also didn’t make them work much later than normal, even with all the daylight hours we had.

In fact a lot of the time the only people doing anything with the site later in the evening were Pigsten and Broli themselves.

Heck, on the longest day of the year Pigsten didn’t make his crew work a anymore more than normal.

In truth he seemed quite content to just relax and enjoy the evening/morning with his family.

Though don’t get me wrong, I’m pretty sure I saw him using the remote controls for the secondary cranes a few times. 😉

He was sneaky like that – and sometimes you could have swore you saw even the big crane moving once the crew was gone.

As I have discussed before, spring and summer were very rainy the year we were in Iceland – even worse than normal. So if Pigsten had any hopes of clear summer weather for his site, those days didn’t really come.

Now the rain didn’t seem to bother him too much, though when it rains every day of an entire month (it did) you ultimately just have to deal with it.

For their part his crew also didn’t seem to mind, I mean one doesn’t grow up in Iceland and not get used to bad weather.

They soon started to circle around to our side of the site – something Pigsten was much more pleased about than SB and I.

Much of our lack of enthusiasm stemmed from the fact that once they’d completed that side, the workers would be much closer to level with our windows – meaning that our privacy was effectively gone unless we kept the curtains closed all the time.

The good news about that is that we left for mainland Europe right around the time that was about to happen. In the interim while we were gone, Pigsten continued to remotely monitor the site’s progress, though to his credit he still mostly went into vacation mode.

Most of the work that occurred while we were gone was on the “far” side of the site, so still nothing too intrusive insofar as our apartment was concerned.

This next photo shows the extensive work done on that “back” area – a process which was soon to be repeated on our side.

Fortunately (from our perspective – not Pigsten’s) this was a relatively slow process.

This “far/back” area was a full story taller than “our” side by the time we returned from Europe.

Once we were back (and brought the rain with us, apparently) most of Pigsten’s focus was still on that “far” side.

However, with our final days in Iceland being so hectic we probably wouldn’t have noticed too much even if they were right outside our windows. Speaking of those final days, Pigsten was a dutiful foreman right up to the very end – and in fact as soon as we woke up on our last day in Iceland he went straight to his foreman’s spot as if it was a normal day.

We almost even had to drag him with us to the airport as he was so intent on finishing up a last few on-site tasks before his departure.

But, being the good boy he is (though he is like Tristen and very ornery sometimes), he came along when we called for him. Plus, it’s not like he was abandoning the site – nope, he simply moved onto the next phase of his coursework: “Remote Site Management.” Now he continues to work on the site, he just does so from our new home. While Pigsten does take his work very seriously, he also likes sharing it with us (but not too many details, he likes his secrets 😛 ) and so he does pass along photos of the site from time to time. As of me writing this (10/8/18) this is the most recent photo of the project that Pigsten has sent me:

As you can see, the privacy concerns that SB and I had have now come to fruition – though that is no longer our problem! 🙂

You might be thinking, “All that and it’s not even finished!?” well – I did consider waiting until the building was done and then doing a post about it, but I decided that the period of construction when we lived there was the most important to, you know, our experiences there. I will, however, come back and update this post with a final, completed, shot of Pigsten’s site once it has been passed along to me by Mr. Foreman. I obviously can’t say when that will be, as such details are beyond my Pigsten Security Clearance level.

In the end, living across from the construction site was far less annoying than living with children who had nothing expected of them aside from blaring music each night. Oddly enough, the one time the construction site did piss SB and I off was when they (they being one particular guy who I bet I could still pick out) insisted on BLARING horrible club music all. day. long. It started with decent music on Saturdays, but then progressed to crap club music 6 days a week. Whoever made the boom-box he was using should be proud of themselves, as that thing had obscenely “good” bass. Let’s put it this way, I was seriously considering breaking into the construction site at night and destroying it – fortunately it didn’t come to that as we took our complaints to the police when the manager didn’t listen. Pigsten of course had “bigger fish to fry” than dealing with noise complaints, so he conveniently ignored us. But, other than that week or so of blaring crap music, I can’t think of any point during the year where I despised the construction site more than I did my neighbors or a certain one of my professors.

In truth, watching the construction site grow – under Pigsten’s dutiful eye no less – was one of the defining experiences of our time in Iceland, and so it was kind of neat to retrace its progress over the course of the year. From that first moment we entered our apartment and saw the huge muddy pit, to the final moments of cement-mixer noise as we drove to the airport to leave Iceland – it was, in all, just as much a part of our time there as anything else.

So, much like Ser-ree-ohs, the site will always be one of those quirky things I think of when I think of our time abroad. Pigsten, of course, agrees.

Until next time,
-Taco

[Update: As of late February 2020 the site appears to be fully finished and will soon be accepting student residents! Image below.]