Ooh la la

The drywall is done; the walls are primed and we are on to the fun part now. Justin and I donned our painting outfits this weekend and broke out the old paintin' tools. Justin rolled and I cut-in and we were able to finish 1.5 rooms and a closet in one day. On the second day, we were a little less productive. Most of the day was spent chasing cracks in the concrete floor with a grinder so we can fill them in with an epoxy and hopefully get a smoother floor to paint. While Justin worked with the epoxy, I wired up all of the outlets in the tool room. Justin installed the trim for the recessed lights and wired up the light in the closet.

This room just needs some concrete patching, some paint on the floor and some baseboard trim and it will be done. The nice cozy gray that we have in our bedroom is on the walls in this room.

On Sunday afternoon, we knocked off some more wall painting: the stairwell and new pantry. We opted to paint the pantry and the wall adjacent to the kitchen the blue that is in the kitchen. Presumably, you'll be able to see this area from within the kitchen and painting it the same color gives a nice continuity.

A rare action shot: me painting.

Here's one tube worth of epoxy in the cracks in our storage room. It looks like we'll be using about 4-5 of these $30 tubes to get this job done.

We will be prepping the floors for paint this next week and hopefully installing base trim soon too. Once these 2 rooms are completed, we are going to be able to move all of our stuff back into the basement!

Mind-Numbing Equity

There's no term for the "equity" that we put into our house this weekend. We made up a new one: Mind-Numbing Equity. Neither of us worked up much of a sweat but we did spend hours at the same tedious tasks. With the framing near complete, we had to open up the basement floor to allow a post to be set to support some flooring joists below the bathrooms. Justin did all of the work here save for marking the concrete with the location.

Here's our 1 foot deep hole for the post.

While he was at it, Justin busted out the last of the bricks from the chimney so he'd have it ready when it is time to pour concrete patches.

Here are the remnants of what I was doing while Justin shoveled out the basement: staples from the carpet pad installation. There are about 600 million of these in the wood floors and stairs and they all have to come out before the floor can be refinished. I pulled them all out of the stairs this weekend.

Our other big task this weekend was to deal with the flooring. We know that there are wood floors throughout the house. Most of the house is fir flooring except for the dining and living which is oak. The oak flooring is in questionable shape and to date, we've been operating under the idea that the oak needs to be replaced because it can't be sanded down and refinished. The thickness isn't there--maybe we have 1/4"-3/8" with which to work. The fir on the other hand is 3/4" tongue and groove and is in pretty good condition--nothing a good refinishing can't fix. There are several places that will need to be patched due to moving heat registers, a missing chimney and a few walls in new places. In the downstairs hallway, kitchen and a little spot upstairs there is (was) glue-down vinyl/linoleum flooring. In the hallway, the flooring came up beautifully once we applied the heat gun to it. You can see the photo below where it looks nearly brand new. In the kitchen and upstairs though, it's another story. The vinyl is really stuck. We bought some sanding/brushing attachments for the angle grinder to try and remove the glue and paper backing from the flooring. Our method works but it is slow going. We're not sure what we're going to do for the kitchen which is approximately 200 square feet and will take a lot of time.

Here's a photo of the hallway minus the glue-down flooring.

This is the little nook upstairs that we carved out from the former bathroom that is now part of the hallway and might become a little desk area in the future. The lighter patch of wood on the right is the area that we used the grinder on. This area is about 5 square feet and maybe took us a half hour to remove the glue.This is the kitchen floor, just a little corner that we scraped the top part of the vinyl flooring from. The white stuff left is the paper backing and there is a really tacky, gummy glue under that.

Another day in demolition

The snow has melted enough now that we were able get up on the roof today. Today's project was tearing down the chimney below the roofline and patching the roof. This is our last big demo project to complete before we can start construction. Justin scrambled up there and had the chimney knocked down below the roofline in about 15 minutes. That was the easy part because the mortar was so loose that it really wasn't doing anything. Too bad though because earlier we had stopped by the Home Depot for a fancy new tool, a roto-hammer, for busting up the mortar. After we had the big hole in our roof, we went back to the Depot for roof patching materials. Of course, they didn't have the shingles we needed and couldn't get them anytime soon.

Here's Justin up on the roof with the chimney liner pulled out.

Yeah! Waste Management finally came to pick up our dumpster. We got to meet our neighbor Brett who lives in the house just behind this truck. He helped up shovel the alley a little to get the WM truck into our driveway.

A shot of our hole before the patch.

Here's Justin cutting up some new framing for the rafters to fill in our hole in the roof.