With one side varnished and (slightly) protected, Liz flipped the doors to begin working on the other side.
There’s a bit of a timing concern. Ideally, the exterior gets 3 coats of varnish, for protection. But with each coat, it takes something like 8-16 hours to dry. So while there’s a single coat on the interior, that’s enough. And now the challenge is to try to get enough coats on the exterior, before all the flooring work begins.
Liz, showing how slick the doors are.
Big night for the door work. After several manual application attempts failed… Liz determined that the best way to apply her suspended dye/shellac mixture was to use a sprayer. So she headed out to Rockler in the suburbs, to pick up a unit.
In the meanwhile, I got the dining room ready to serve as a temporary spray booth. This meant covering up the walls with plastic, and making the whole area look like a serial killer’s playpen.
Prep work for the upstairs porch door: cutting painter’s tape, and protecting all the glass areas.
So the big news – we’re getting new flooring installed on the second floor. A big part of all the cleanup work we’ve started (with so much more to go)… is all about getting everything off the first and second floor.
While we struggle with that task, today we received a shipment of flooring (which needs a bit of time inside, to acclimate before install).
The coat rack, which needed to be moved and broken down, to make space for the lab table. We’ve got lots of stuff, and not a ton of space to work with.
We were pretty busy all night, with a constant stream of kids. This was one of the few moments where I stopped to take out my camera, and record one of the interactions.
After removing the tile, Liz went about cleaning the mortar off – and in doing so, had a really amazing discovery. Two in fact!
We’ve got some work scheduled for the second floor, involving newer windows, as well as replacing the old/worn door to the second floor porch. In preparation, we need to provide some of the hardware we want used on these newer pieces (we’re having several windows and a door re-made entirely).
Back home, I get a text from her – and it’s a selfie! With her and our neighbor, Anna!
Turns out, they were both on the same flight (leaving Midway, arriving Georgia)… and only ran into one another afterwards, soon after departing the plane.
After work, Liz and I headed to Journeyman Distillery, in Valparaiso. We were meeting up with family to celebrate Julie’s 70th birthday, at a unique local venue.
We found ourselves with an open Saturday. And Liz felt ok enough to work outside, so we tackled one of the remaining steps for the fence: applying the upper and lower trim.
Here’s the same bit of drywall, looking at it from the bedroom. When we first put up all this drywall (the blue stuff is soundproof drywall), the idea was that we’d eventually cut through and make this an entry into the closet. That day, finally, is today.
We’ve got an eventful weekend, with a bit of prep work to do before we have drywallers coming on Monday to tackle a good part of the second floor. Before they get here, we have some fine-tuning to do.
Liz and I had some supplies to get for house work this weekend. And rather than go out tomorrow, we figured on doing our errands tonight so that we could start without delay, tomorrow.
So: another Friday Night Home Depot Date Night! And all the excitement and glamor that entails.