All The Progress While I Was Gone

The best things always happen to my house when I’m not involved. I balked at the price at first, but in the end allowed the Irishman to work 6 days in a row on my place. He finished a nice mix of things I couldn’t to myself and things that would take me long enough to make the Crooked House my retirement home.

To start, he hung all the kitchen cabinets. He said cutting them down to size and getting them tight to the soffits were both tough jobs. I’ll take his word for it. In the end they’re in, they’re square, and the fillers are scribed neatly into the crooked walls.

Boring through 10 inches of brick for the stove vent might have been a little hard to DIY. (Note where the old fan was before we ripped the wall out.)

Then he went ahead and did all the flooring repairs. These boards came out of the 2 back bedrooms upstairs 2 years ago and have been in my basement and then my back yard under the overhang since then. I’ve said this before, but someone did a hack job shifting the stairs over so the door could be in the living room instead of the kitchen, so I want to fix their poor installation bit by bit. The awkwardly thrown together landing now looks like somebody built it on purpose. And some extra oak boards tidy up where I made the doorway to the kitchen bigger. The plan is still to sand out that old pine in there. I could have done this myself but remember how the upstairs floors took me 2 months?

Then he decided that it’s not a big deal to install all the door jambs before the floors are done after all and put the last 2 in. All the better, now I can finish them before the floors, quite a relief. The crooked door to the front bedroom was apparently a pain.

The back bedroom door needed a threshold made out of a floorboard to transition gracefully from level to crooked floors. It’s made out of an original floorboard so we can pretend I have a finished house when we look at it.

And here’s the upstairs hall now, with all 5 pretty doors in place! It’s kind of funny that after I’ve lived without these doors for years, suddenly they can go in before the floors are done. But somebody wanted to keep entertained while he was marooned in South Philly.

Does it look better than the before photo yet?

Upstairs hall

And now the biggest door mismatch is in place. I was gonna paint all my doors until I realized that 8 of them are far to nice for me to paint if I want to sleep at night. So now all my doors will be stained, except for the ones that aren’t. I think these closet doors were made to be paint grade.

And finally, he’s not 100% done, and one of the things undone is the cleanup. Nothing stays tidy in this house for long. Here’s the living room I just emptied last week. I can barely walk through this but I decided not to mess with it till he’s done.

Upstairs Floors Post 5: You Can Walk Everywhere Now

So you saw last time that my floor patches were kind of terrifyingly unsupported because it looked better that way. After I wrote that my dad and I fixed the problem by putting subflooring up from the living room. Yep, fun job. Before that could happen, out came the old gas light lines.

Upstairs Floors Post 3: Now there’s something to see

So I ended my hiatus this weekend. Yesterday very little happened and I started to brace myself for a VERY slow process to finish this job, but today it actually looks different! So first I planned ahead. The floors in my house were installed without a subfloor, so every floorboard joint is over a joist. I taped off where the joints would be if I kept it that way.

Planning ahead, to the flooring and beyond!

I feel like I’ve turned another corner with the house. I’ve constantly had to do bits and pieces of things all over the house to be ready for one contractor after another. I’ve started low priority things during downtime and not finished them. And I ended up spending half the summer siding the cantilever. Which I still love. But now, my plumber is coming (when he gets back from vacation) to hook up my bathtub and I’m getting that patio door installed, and other than those things, no other contractors are coming in until I have the drywall taped. I’m free to work at my own pace!

So does this mean that I’m done skipping around? No! My next order of business is doing the jobs that will get rid of all the piles of junk that are in my way. I’m putting the floors down before the walls are up. And I don’t even think that’s crazy. But I want all this crap gone. And by gone, I mean installed.