Remodel Progress

Ben and Lois are here! Well, right now, they are in Chicago, but they are “here” in general. The house will wait!

Since they are out of town, I thought I’d show where we stopped (and will be picking up).

The drywalling is done, and the whole clan rallied to prime the new walls.

Dad priming the bathroom. Sis-in-law Mary was also on the scene.

I’ve also bought the paint. It’s white paint. White paint is ridiculously difficult to pick out, so fingers crossed that we decide we chose something vaguely acceptable once it’s up on the walls.

We started finishing the floor in the bathroom, including installing the in-floor heat. That saga is ongoing, and the bathroom is not operational yet. Much more on all that later.

Electric heat in goop.

We hung some curtains since we are sleeping up there, so that’s windows semi-managed for now.

These are too short. The ones in the bedroom are too long.

I started stripping the doors we’re going to reuse. Once all the stripping is done, there will be hinge-flipping and refinishing, and eventually hanging.

This door took a ridiculous amount of stripping.

There’s a door at the bottom of the stairs, but no door on the bedroom yet (pending refinishing and everything), so early morning light intrudes through the reading room skylight. As a temporary fix, I grabbed a twin mattress and propped it up monolith-style between the skylight and the bedroom.

“Oh my god…it’s full of stuffing!”

Besides that mattress, two men and a boy also moved a queen-sized mattress up the stairs. There are no pictures because there are really no leisurely moments during such an endeavour. Here’s a video metaphor for getting a queen-sized mattress through a narrow door to some steep stairs:

Once done, Mayya took advantage.

We also got some lights put up and the electricity working. Of course, some of the lights are vintage or salvaged, so more on those projects another time.

We’re sort of living up there!

Some progress makes the time off feel well-deserved.