Night shifts

After my last post (which was Tuesday evening) I headed back over to the house.  Effie and I have been getting in to more of a rhythm with the house.   We go over in the morning, then come home to go for a run and to eat, we warm up a bit, and then we go back at night.  We usually get cold after 3-4 hours, so doing 2 shifts gives us a longer work day without getting too cold.

Tuesday night Effie was a bit too cold still, so I went back alone and put up the door in the small bedroom.  We bought this modern door (which doesn't match any other door in the house) despite the fact we could have bought an older one for the same price at habitat, because we didn't think we could find the antique handle to go on it.   Well, we found the handle at an architectural salvage shop, and then the door was sold by the time we went back.  This one looks just fine.  Although when you're working with an older house, the doorways are almost never straight.  This job took 2 hours with all the shaving and cutting required, and the door is now anything but square. Anyway, with the door on and all the walls in this room painted, we were able to make a break room out of it with a couple chairs and a little heater. 

We volunteered in the morning at Habitat for Humanity as we do most Wednesdays.  And afterwards we took care of some other things and never made it over to the house.

Thursday was a pretty full-on day.  We finished up almost all of the painting on the top floor.   I fixed the bricks and patched a few holes on the floor.  My brother gave me some wood scraps from a project he did with his stairs and the wood he gave us happened to match our floor exactly.  And its good hard solid wood, not just floorboards, so it should last a while.  I used a power saw to get a rough piece, then a chisel and scraper to make it the perfect shape and then banged it in.  All in all, it turned out ok.

Later that night we puttied up every single seam in the room and left it to dry overnight.

Today we met with a carpenter to get an estimate on fixing the back wall.  At $1800, its not as bad as we thought it could be.  That includes replacing the joist in the basement and replacing the entire back wall.  The carpenter can start as early as Monday, provided we can get the permits.  Which as we know is not always easy.  We went to the boro and once again they said we needed more info than we had.  Wish they would have told us this the last time we were there.

We spent the majority of the day getting the floor prepped for a clear coat on the wood floor.  It was a lot of cleaning and sanding and more cleaning.  In the end, we got the coat on at about 6pm.  It says on the can to apply it between 60 and 80 degrees, so either we ignore that rule or we wait until July.  We gave it a go.  We'll see how it looks tomorrow.