so for the last week we’ve been trying to

prep the place for some serious movin’ and

shakin’. so without too much ado, here’s

where we are now.

this weekend, starting friday, we started to

get some appliances in. they delivered the rest

of them

on saturday morning and in conjunction

with finishing out the downstairs water closet,

we got some things put in the kitchen and in

the ‘service corridor‘. and i promised some

pics of the back porch and the view…

so that’s where we are now. this week we’ll be

trying to finish the upstairs and get ready to

move on sunday…wish us luck

so here are some smashing pix of the new floor

treatment downstairs and some other bits that

we’ve been able to finish.  the floor turned out

pretty well, i think: new floor.  it has an aplique look more

than we’d like, but we are confident that after

some wear and use (new foyer floor with ‘character’ )

it will have the appearance that we’re looking for.

it looks twentythousand times better than it did.

floor comparison

but erin is going at the priming and painting with

an unprecedented fervor, and the downstairs kitchen

and water-closet are both getting prepped for use.

like creating the base for the sink: ready for rock .

plus we’re starting to add some finishing touches to

the a/v wall (av wall with lights) and the dining k-nook.

and taking care of some essentials 1.

so soon we’ll be moved in enough to live there after

we get some appliances and get our stuff out of mom

and dad’s ‘business’…need some help? are you sure?

whenever you look up some intel about the

joys of staining concrete floors there’s always

some pitch like this: ’stained concrete floors are

not only maintenance free, but can be attractive

and blah blah blah… experience the warmth and

glow of a professionally-stained concrete floor in

your new construction project today!’

well let me tell you about the ‘warmth and glow’

of prepping existing construction for staining.

first you need one of these:

4″ scraper.

then you’ll need to drink about three gallons of

water and add some smashing gloves to your mitts.

because when you’re finished scraping you’ll have

lost 5 pounds in sweat (feeling the ‘warmth and glow’)

and have added 5-6 nicely-formed blisters to boot

the blisters are warm and glow-ey as well.

so i went over this floor at least twice in its entirety

with the scraper and then brought in the big guns;

the floor sander cometh. i won’t go into the nuances

of how you and the sander will warm up to each other,

but with a few hours of concrete dust settling into

your eyes everything has a nice ‘glow’ to it.

‘is that you, grampa?…what are you doing here?’

‘come into the light…’ but with an afternoon of

sanding we had a nice clean floor . here’s another,

note the finished-out beam @ the furred-down dining

also there’s a great view of the sander with its happy

warm and glowing 500′ power cord:

clean floor II

then it was on to the staining, more on that later.

i showed some photos of the beam

being raised and patched in the last

post. but one thing we did during

that time was build an area for all

of the audio/video equipment and

speakers and such. we call it the a/v

wall (or ‘av wall’ for short because i’m

too lazy to incorporate that backslash into

my typing skill set).

but the wall as it was had an ancient version of

sound baffling. which is probably better for you

and the environment (in it’s make-up) than the

stuff they make now, but it doesn’t perform as

well. it seems to be made up of lightly compressed

wood fibres. as much of it as i’ve handled, it’s

definitely not a fiberglass product. but this stuff

lines the wall and ceiling where we’re putting our

av wall, so removing it to get to the stud locations

and the electricity was first. ‘clean slate’ for av

then we had some walls going up on each side.

these will house the speakers and the sub.

then there’s going to be this fabulous bench seat

(adding the bench) that will provide some additional seating

and help frame the screenwall. then we’re going

to bring down the ceiling (nearly finished av structure)

just above the seat for some additional lighting

lights cut in and (again) to help frame the

screenwall opening. and TA DA!

call those sheetrock boys, cause we’re ready to finish .

we also decided that the back porch was a bit

sparse with two foldable camp chairs, so we

invested in some happy plants and the decided

we needed more happy plants and some furniture.

but i’ll post those pics later.

as promised…some photos of the…

ah crap i’m watching a fantastic

DVD of ocean’s 13 (straight from

asia) (didn’t see the flick in theatres)

so i’m all distracted.

here are some newer versions of the place.

enjoy. (ye…i’m lazy. go and beat my effigy

for not posting earlier)

half-inch drop

that’s what we’re dealing with for getting that

drop-down in the dining area (which sagged

one half of an inch[duh]) so it took a bit of

‘doing’ to get the sucker to be straight.

prep the patch

post in place

she’s up!…didn’t make a sound

straight as a string.

i love that expression, but we literally used

a string to level that thing, so it ‘better be’.

more after the oceans is over

this week we have the drywall

finishers @ the condo to put the

final touches on the mudding and

taping job that erin and i attempted.

any of you out there that do this

for a living get a big gold star.

erin and i laboured over the spackling

of mud on all the little dents and

dings in the walls that happened when

we removed the wallpaper.

we had been doing it for more than a

week while working on the AV wall.

then we decided the pros would do a

better job and probably do it faster.

well, in less than 4 hours those cats

had nearly the entire place completely

mudded and taped (ok, that photo isn’t

our condo, obviously, but that’s what a

nice mud and tape job looks like finished)

and had gone back over our spackling to boot. (applause).

i’ll have some pics for you later.

but when this portion is done, then it’s

time for flooring and moving in because

i love the view out the back, but it’d be

nice to see this one as well…

the view from the front.

ok so i honestly don’t recall what we

did next. it was all such a flurry of

activity and destruction that i’m now

resigned to just following cues from

the ‘date picture taken’ arrangement

(in the windows explorer window) of

all of this ‘recording’ of our project.

at this point we’re trying to get ready

for the sheetrock dude to re-texture

the walls and ceilings. so the upstairs

(as the first ‘danger area echo’) recieved

a nice ‘once over’.

master bedrooom 1

clean mbath
clean guest bed

you might remember this bit of innovation

above the stairs? ’storage’ ?

in typical purging fashion, we had to take steps.

taking (removing) steps…

and we were able to get some of the debris

out of the great room downstairs. cleaner greatroom.

and we got this bathroom: first floor bath 1

a little more streamlined: first floor bath

naturally all of the stuff in the greatroom had

to go somewhere, so until we got rid of it:

the back porch became the repository.

notice the smashing cover-up job.

the least we could do to try to preserve the

serenity of the view… ahhhhh.

some will notice that there are two indespensible

items on the back porch…steel, and BBQ.

in fact, the impetus to finish this place

(at this point) is to preserve the sanity of

the kitty, and to fire that bullet bbq up!

so i said in another post that ‘erin did all of this’

and these photos are of that fateful june 25th.

the thing about the kitchen is that is that it was

rather small, even for a galley kitchen.

so we must ‘create some space’.

kitchen demo 1

kitchen demo 2

kitchen demo 3

naturally you run into a few less-than-savory

elements in the kitchen… but hopefully all you

suffer is a damaged pallate, not infectious amoebic dysentery.

here’s what we found:

stove removal

love that little pile to the right.

mmmm…pet foooood…aggghhh.

and i’m surprised the joint didn’t burn

to the ground 20 years ago.

how BOUT that ‘lectric wahhring!?

and, (last lament) of course,

poor froggy.

and i swear that when we walked this place

before we bought it, this scene played out.

e- ’say, why is there a big piece of blue cabinet-top

for the sink cabinet floor?’

seller- ‘we put that there.’

e- ‘has there been a leak or any water damage?’

seller- ‘OH nO! we just put it there, it’s fine’

e- (dubious) ‘ohhh kay.’

well here’s what we found when we removed

the sink and the cabinet top underneath:

under the ’sink’

under the ’sink’ 2

and it kept ‘getting funnier and funnier EVERY time i see it!’

what lies beneath

by the dishwash

behind the dishwash

that ‘piece of wood’ sitting atop the dishwasher

is the bottom of the side panel to the sink cab.

so after yanking the dishwasher out, we found

this on the far wall of the kitchen.

the nast

but the sucker did come clean

clean kitchen

and there was much rejoicing

‘clean’ kitchen!

of course, the pesky laws of thermodynamics

dicatate that it all has to go somewhere, it can’t

just vaporize. (dang!) so that left us with

the aftermath

and to quote Dr. Ian Malcom:

‘now that is one big pile of sh!t.’

and we left that night with a bit of

debris lying about…

you can go to the ‘bne…’ tab and learn

a bit about us and know this… buuuut

b and e have been married for 11 years.

hardly seems possible.

not that we’re still together.

but that it’s been that long.

so for just this post i’ll leave off with something

sufficiently tacky/cheezy/juvenille:

so the kitchen had similar styling and wallpaper-ing.

so you know what’s going to happen next…

DESTRUCTO!

here are some before shots:

kitchen 1

kitchen 2

microwave ’shelf’

this is a close-up of the wallpaper and border

newcondo008.jpg

make you want a nice egg creme?