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.
The desk is actually an old
1920’s E.H. Sheldon & Co. Science Table (with a crazy amount of drawers).
There was some discussion back and forth (between us, the masons, and our tile person) as to who should actually set the terra cotta squares. We landed on having the masons apply a skim coat of cement, and to keep the terra cotta squares free (so that the tile guy could set them, when the actual tile is put in).
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).
We mentioned that we had a decent stash of older Common brick, much of which we accumulated while working on the house (and which Liz had meticulously cleaned). All that work paid off, as the workers were able to pick and choose from what we had available.
Of late, I’ve relocated my office down to the dining room… so this means, I needed to move my desk. And we also needed to cordon off the dining room as much as possible (we’re anticipating a lot of dust/debris over the next week or so).
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.
The day we were visiting, we learned that the lift was waiting for some repairs – so not a lot of work was possible, since none of the slabs could be moved. Lucky for us, one of the owners joined our walkthrough and helped us with some suggestions and answered a lot of our questions.
The end goal is to have this box flush with the first layer of plywood, and to ultimately have a section of the actual floor serve as a kind removable cover. Something like this.
We’ve got a bit of work to do in the main bedroom. There’s a light in the dining room (on the first floor) that we want to relocate, and the easiest way to do that is to go through the floor from up here.
Expecting a mess today, with a lot of drywall dust in the air from sanding. Woke up early to try to get things covered up as best we can.