Author: turtle

i had big plans for the weekend: get the water for the kitchen hooked up (again), and start framing in the walls of the bathroom. didn’t quite get there, but we got most of the way.

after plastering the the bedroom wall, we noticed that it cracked when janeen jumped in the doorway! not promising. i’d noticed beforehand that when the plumber had installed the sewer pipes in the old bathroom, they had destroyed one joist, and left a second one next to it almost completely cut. i think this is the reason for much of the cracking in the wall – so this weekend i resolved to reinforce the joist that was in the worst shape, and runs under this wall.

janeen spent hours stripping layers of old paint from the old trim that goes around the bedroom door. difficult to see (maybe janeen will upload a better picture…) but theres green, gold, beige, white…

my second goal was to get the pipes connected into the kitchen. had to tear up the carpet to install them. when i was in the middle of pulling up the carpet, janeen said, “it just gets more and more ugly. when’s it going to start looking pretty?” soon. i hope.

didn’t quite get the pipes all connected up, but janeen did some framing.

we have been trying to reuse as much wood as we can. this means we spend a lot of time pulling out old nails, and unscrewing screws. so far, we have filled seven cans with nails.

We decided that even though the upstairs walls are really cool looking, with the distressed plaster and layers of stripped paint, we’d give it a nice coat of pink paint — in honor of my brother. No, really, this pink paint is called ‘PlasterWeld’ and it’s supposed to help the veneer plaster adhere properly to the walls. Our plan was to coat the walls and do the plastering this weekend. I got a bit distracted, as you’ll see.

Earlier in the week, our illustrious – and now even more prosperous – plumber dug up our driveway to repair the sewer pipe. Besides the ever increasing quotes, we didn’t realize that the plumber was planning to use the driveway to store piles of dirt dug out to get at the sewer pipe – for over a week. This ordeal is still not over. Hopefully tomorrow the building inspector will sign off on it without prompting any more cost escalation.

I had to shovel the piles to each side to squeeze the car out.


Meanwhile, back to the real project: The drainage pipes for the shower are finally in and finished.

Now on to getting water into the shower – since we’ve already removed the crazy piping on the outside of the house, we need to find a new shorter route inside the house. [above left: We can’t figure out why one would need to make this shape pipe?]

Extra pipe, anyone?

I tried to carefully cut out the gyp board from the ceiling in the lower level so i can reuse it after installing the plumbing pipes. Mostly successful, and plenty of plaster dust in my hair, ears, eyes, nose and mouth:

Janeen did loads of prep work getting the upstairs bedroom ready for plastering, and also started demolishing the funny dysfunctional closet beside the kitchen (only half of it was usable). If you’ve never tried it, there’s nothing more frustrating than trying to un-screw painted-over screws that have the head mostly worn out:

She found some rather cute little keys in the process, though.

The walls look pretty with the pink paint, eh?

hey, janeen went over to the house by herself today and started taking the place apart. when i got there, she was covered in dust.

so we started taking apart the stenchy pink bathroom. the previous owners had three boys under the age of twelve.

we were trying to demolish quietly: work started at 9:15 (pm).