Not doing too well at blogging every day.
Lots has happened since the last time; unfortunately, not enough as we are officially 3 weeks behind schedule. We want to talk to Josh about how we can work more in parallel - in other words, we start in on the bedrooms while they finish up the bathrooms - but so far no response from that quarter. Frustrating.
Anyway, the dry wall upstairs seems to be finished and I think the tile work will begin next week. We can now clearly see the bathrooms: all the walls are up and the shower basins are down. Yes, they're small but not tiny; they're going to be great.
The one on the left goes with the "French" room and the other goes with the "Ohio" room. Guess we don't have a picture of our bathroom.
As for us, we have 3 main areas of attack: Dom's office and the back staircase plus we've added the second floor landing. Thought the landing was going to be relatively easy but of course it's not. Lots of trim to be painted three times to achieve that "stained wood" look with paint; crown molding that has been plastered into the ceiling; and plaster walls in their usual poor shape.
Walls skimcoated, not yet primed; chair rail with first coat of base paint.
Pried out a piece of the crown molding which broke off. Why they replastered the ceiling without removing the crown molding is beyond us, but this kind of thing seemed to happen often. We have toyed with pulling it all down and re-doing the ceiling - especially since a light fixture that was installed on the ceiling was poorly replastered - but Reeny and Jon told us about putting a larger crown molding over this one which seems like the right thing to do.
Part of the landing project includes fixing the window cords. Very interesting to see the inner workings of these old rope and pulley systems. The (extremely heavy) iron weight has some interesting markings on them.
We're disappointed at the paint job we discovered on the exterior of these windows. Billy did such good work everywhere else (that we've seen), but he really cut corners on these - virtually no prep work, just painted over all the old stuff. Guess he thought they wouldn't be seen. Dom's doing a better job.
The back stairs are the slowest project since I can only work on them during the weekend. So far I've skimcoated about half of the area where the bookcase used to be. I plan to finish that area tomorrow and also finish patching and sanding the rest of the stairwell.
Dom's office, on the other hand, is voted "project most likely to be completed in our lifetime." He's done his own electricity, he's hung his own drywall, he's done an amazing job of taping, skimcoating, and priming. Tomorrow, I think, he's going to paint. His motivation, if he needed one, is the fact that we bought a gorgeous 1862 bookcase to put in it today at the Medina Antique Mall. We love that place. (Got a dresser, granola jar, and salt/pepper shakers, too.)
This picture doesn't do it justice and is about a week old anyway. Got to take some more tomorrow.
Lots has happened since the last time; unfortunately, not enough as we are officially 3 weeks behind schedule. We want to talk to Josh about how we can work more in parallel - in other words, we start in on the bedrooms while they finish up the bathrooms - but so far no response from that quarter. Frustrating.
Anyway, the dry wall upstairs seems to be finished and I think the tile work will begin next week. We can now clearly see the bathrooms: all the walls are up and the shower basins are down. Yes, they're small but not tiny; they're going to be great.
As for us, we have 3 main areas of attack: Dom's office and the back staircase plus we've added the second floor landing. Thought the landing was going to be relatively easy but of course it's not. Lots of trim to be painted three times to achieve that "stained wood" look with paint; crown molding that has been plastered into the ceiling; and plaster walls in their usual poor shape.
Walls skimcoated, not yet primed; chair rail with first coat of base paint.
Pried out a piece of the crown molding which broke off. Why they replastered the ceiling without removing the crown molding is beyond us, but this kind of thing seemed to happen often. We have toyed with pulling it all down and re-doing the ceiling - especially since a light fixture that was installed on the ceiling was poorly replastered - but Reeny and Jon told us about putting a larger crown molding over this one which seems like the right thing to do.
Part of the landing project includes fixing the window cords. Very interesting to see the inner workings of these old rope and pulley systems. The (extremely heavy) iron weight has some interesting markings on them.
We're disappointed at the paint job we discovered on the exterior of these windows. Billy did such good work everywhere else (that we've seen), but he really cut corners on these - virtually no prep work, just painted over all the old stuff. Guess he thought they wouldn't be seen. Dom's doing a better job.
The back stairs are the slowest project since I can only work on them during the weekend. So far I've skimcoated about half of the area where the bookcase used to be. I plan to finish that area tomorrow and also finish patching and sanding the rest of the stairwell.
Dom's office, on the other hand, is voted "project most likely to be completed in our lifetime." He's done his own electricity, he's hung his own drywall, he's done an amazing job of taping, skimcoating, and priming. Tomorrow, I think, he's going to paint. His motivation, if he needed one, is the fact that we bought a gorgeous 1862 bookcase to put in it today at the Medina Antique Mall. We love that place. (Got a dresser, granola jar, and salt/pepper shakers, too.)
This picture doesn't do it justice and is about a week old anyway. Got to take some more tomorrow.
