As Bob was working on the new closet, he needed the top part of the drywall mudded and taped (per code). He’s finishing up the duct work here, and needed this done before the next day. So Liz ended up suiting up unexpectedly tonight, and put in some time trying to get into some pretty tight spaces.
It was mostly lathe removal, but led to a ton of debris and soot from the ceiling. A shame that our new plywood got so dark from grime and muck. You can see where the trash can was, and how dirty the debris makes things.
It’s amazing to see the first floor so… open. And for the floor to feel so continuously solid, room to room. It really does feel like a different space, walking around. The rooms are continuing to look more and more like rooms again.
Today, Nick and Milton put down some of the plywood on top of the self-leveling underlayment. This will end up creating a really solid sandwich, as there’s a layer of plywood underneath everything already.
The day has arrived! It’s time for the big pour! I can’t stress to you how big of a milestone this is for us. I know it’s an intermediate step, and we’re not even close to the final floor install… but to be at a point where the leveling is possible is incredibly exciting. It’s difficult to express how fantastic this moment/day feels.
Something I wasn’t prepared for though: pink floors!
The flooring guys (Nick and Milton) put in the final bits of plywood, covering over the joists that Bob strengthened yesterday. After that, they sealed up a lot of the seams between the plywood they had put down.
Next up: Nick says he’s going to seal up all the edges and seams between boards, in prepartion for the self-leveling underlayment. I recall him saying something like how we needed to seal up the floor “like a siwmming pool,” because if the self-leveling liquid finds a gap… it’s just going to pour right down into the basement like water.
Liz said she felt a bit depressed because “the goalposts moved,” but she powered through things as always. With the flooring guys and Bob working during the day (and us working remote during the day), we end up having to do what we can in the evenings.
We’re lucky to have Milton and Nick (L to R) working on our floors. Bob’s worked with them before on a few jobs, and the come highly recommended. Bob’s got an incredibly high bar for the quality of work he expects of those in the trade… so when he’s enthusiastic about someone, we know to pay attention.
We had a lot of debris to take out, but our first floor is officially cleared and prepped for the flooring guys tomorrow. It’s a crazy feeling, to see how different the floors look, and to imagine people coming in to take over the remainder of the work.
To clear the way for the flooring guys, we needed to remove the lower stairs and put in something temporary. While Bob was building those temp stairs out for us, we had a night that involved this placeholder, until the temp stairs were ready.
Bob was over tonight, clearing out a few layers of the brick underneath the old closet. This is effectively the top of the empty chimney stack, which we have access to via the basement.
Tonight we pulled up the floor where the old closet used to be.
With the work we did pulling up the floor in the main hall, we had to do something with all that debris. Hence my day today: cutting up the super long boards, and packing as much as I could into a Bagster.