Scarlet Oak Distillery remodel WIP.

[limpid laurel]

Finally getting around to giving b42 a run, and I've decided that this time I'm finally going to set myself up in Louisville for the first time. I don't typically like feeling incredibly rushed when I'm playing, but I also don't want to feel like I'm cheating myself out of the experience of huge hordes, so I usually have my zeds set at .75 to start, increasing to 4.0 over a period of 96 days, instead of the standard 28. I also tend to play through the winter, which makes stockpiling food necessary, since farming doesn't really work below freezing too well.

I started at the north end of the property where the warehouse is because I've got stockholm syndrome and fantasize about living in a repurposed warehouse, even though I've been working in warehousing for the last ten years. I yearn for the ability to have a huge open floor plan domicile, where it's possible to have your whole living space in one room without being cramped into a 275 sq ft studio apartment.

So again, starting at the north end of the northernmost building, I've started my remodel with the warehouse portion of the property. I began by completely gutting the shipping dock area, and between trips to the nearby warehouses and many hours of stuffing whiskey bottles into a backpack 8-12 at a time, I managed to get some couple hundred bottles of whiskey into the handful of crates in the corner by the northern garage door. Those will be useful as disinfectant later. I also found a dead guy locked in a bathroom with about 7 empty bottles just down the road, which was kind of depressingly funny.

From the warehouse trips, I also managed to pull a ton of shelves and enough metal to build jail walls around a fair portion of the first floor, beginning with a cage around my main storage area in the shipping bay. I also split the loading bay in half, using the front as secure parking for a few select vehicles, and at least one bay open for inbound shipments, should I need to go raid another warehouse or 3 in the future.

Attached to the storage behind the cage and a section of half wall, I've got my sleeping/living quarters. Once I get a bit more progress on this building and have the perimeter a bit more secure, I plan to set my little living quarters up with a few retro consoles modded in, but as we all know, you can't play video games while you've got work to be done, right?

I ripped the office, bathrooms, and storage closet apart to extend the sleeping space before creating a large walk in closet and an absolute monster of a bathroom with a separate room for a shower. All this space, I figured might as well make use of it with a bit of extravagance, and where better place to exercise my right to luxury than on the john, or while taking a shower? My next step here is to get up on that section of roof to build a rain collector so I can get a few things connected to the plumbing.

Next, I dismantled the equipment in the bottling room, smashed the walls down, threw up some load bearing columns, and redid the floors. I've not quite decided what to do with it, but I'll probably end up filling it with couches and art and a piano and shit. Basically it's going to be a "sitting room" like the people with houses with too many rooms have. No TVs or anything, just a bunch of furniture, potted plants, and statues. Real majestic and grandiose.

I also extended(?) the front hallway, though I'm not sure if it's extended if I smashed the wall down to make the room bigger by encompassing the hallway that previously existed. Either way, I fixed that hallway up nice and proper with some nice, soft carpeting before slapping down some tiles to make it look like the sidewalk was a bit below the level of the jail walls. I didn't like the idea of carpet being exposed to so much rain and snow. Even though it's not real, the aesthetic had to be there for the immersion.

Between all of these other tasks, I picked away at smashing all of the barrels in the storage/maturing room(s) on all three levels. They're fully non-functional and can't even be dismantled, so that was a waste, but I've got them all out. I'm just trying to decide what to do with those areas now. The second floor is mostly devoted to backup and overflow storage for anything that does fit on the shelves I've got assigned in the main storage cage.

The second floor of all of these buildings are connected by elevated hallways, which is nice because it means I can smash out the stairs in the other two buildings and still be perfectly fine in the event that something gets in to those areas. There are multiple phase areas of this base to fall back on in case of zed breach, whether minor or catastrophic. I need to build a basement at some point, but that's a project for later. Right now I build up because zombies can't jump. They can fall down stairs, or at least over the railing.

On the second floor, in addition to clearing out the barrels and slapping a ton of crates down, I pulled the exterior wall back a few tiles and made a terrace on the second floor, that extends into the space above the proposed sitting room, and has a catwalk extending over to a library on the western edge. In the back of the library, there's a connection to a staircase that exists where I ripped the elevator out. Non-functional, was just taking up space. So I made smaller stairs in the spot where the elevator used to be. I've also added a small rear passage connecting the sleeping area to the library, which sits in the space directly above the walk-in and the master bathroom.

I'm still really not sure what to do with the remaining empty space on the second and third floors, but I've got plans to knock down the fence out front, and extend the property to the other side of the road. I plan to have garage door gate access on either end of the street for an added layer of security, and that fence needs to extend at least to the other side of the empty grass plot between my warehouse and the neighboring one, because I plan to use that as a pasture. Once the pasture is secured and I've got some animals hanging around, my land will be essentially secured, and all I have to do is survive through the winter.