The Great Hole of History

I've been working and building like crazy these past two weeks.  Plays and Players, where I am the technical director, has a show going into tech this weekend.  My intern, Rachel and I have been building and painting and hanging set pieces in the studio space. 

We have to build a giant hole in the floor so to do that in our 3rd floor space we must build up to go down.  Above you can see that we've placed what looks like stud walls along the floor.  These are gates which form the skeleton of the deck we are building. 

Here is the replica of the Great Hole of History.  We've placed fabric in the hole and put the deck boards in place.  Our designer wanted a rough hew look to the deck so I used 10" barn board to get the effect.

We painted the deck last night.  To get the affect of older hard wood we sprayed the boards down with water then Danielle (the Asst. SD) and I used two different colors of brown that we had watered down to about a 50/50 ratio.  We applied it with brushes and placed the paint next to each other in a random pattern.  Then Colin, the set designer used an old mop that we found to drag the colors over the boards to blend and distribute the paint over the deck.  We decided that the mop is a very useful painting tool.  That night Colin pointed out that a super soaker would come in handy when painting a set.  I told him that I may just have to get one.  

Tomorrow is the first day of tech and dirt.  More on the dirt next time.