Work Week 13: Tear it Down, Build it Up!
Hello! This past week was exciting. Tired of the insane drafts on the second floor, I plugged every open spot I could on the third floor around the dormers with insulation. The guys were then able to successfully run space heaters in two of the rooms of our future apartment, so they are no longer working indoors in the single digits! Hooray! And work they did! The bathroom needed reconfiguring to fit a tub instead of a tiny stand-up shower, so Paul first took out a little hunk of the wall. Ultimately, we decided it still wasn’t quite big enough, so he took a bigger chunk-much better! Then he cut a hole for the new doorway connecting Ethan’s future bedroom to the rest of our apartment, but the wall was such a rickety little useless thing that at this point, he and Guy decided the best bet was to remove the whole thing and re-stud it, creating a massive, wide open space!
Unfortunately, Ethan says he would prefer not to sleep in the kitchen and all of us enjoy a little privacy in the bathroom, so Alas, we’ll have to put some drywall back up to separate everything again. Until then, Johnny and Johnny are steadily progressing with the new electrical wiring, and Guy has been working plumbing magic trying to make sure everything is in its proper configurations–there has been some very, ah, creative plumbing done in this manor over the years, so most of it needs total replacement.
See what I mean? While Guy & Paul do the core re-building work for the bathroom and kitchen, I’ve planned out which vintage plumbing fixtures we’ll be re-using in the kitchen and bathrooms and cleaned them up somewhat. They aren’t perfect yet, but I’ll get them absolutely gleaming once the rooms are finished!
Meanwhile, Dennis has been going gangbusters tackling the rest of February’s to-do list, mostly more demolition. Every time I think we’re done with the demo, it turns out we’re not! Renovations sure take some serious demolition! Now it’s the ceilings on the third floor that are coming down. Well, to be honest, the vast majority of them were already falling down on their own, but it will make it much easier once it's time for installing heat, air conditioning, wiring, etc. Although we don’t plan to finish the third floor for quite some time, plaster demolition is a nasty, dusty, messy job, so it makes sense to get it done while the rest of the house is still a construction zone.
That’s it for the first week of February! See you next week!