The Weekend Report

First, an update on the bathroom floor. First thing Saturday morning I planned to take another picture of the hole, this time with the basement light on, but our general contractor had installed the new subfloor the day before, so it's another photo opportunity missed.

Also on Friday, the contractors finished the ceiling over the north end of the kitchen. The last step here will be rebuilding beams to match the south end of the kitchen.

Speaking of the south end of the kitchen, here it is:

It's the heart of the home - even mid-renovation. : )

As for what we accomplished this weekend, Saturday we continued sanding woodwork in the laundry room. It was a race to the finish, but when we left that night we considered the room done. Unfortunately, inspecting our work yesterday I found a few areas that still have those annoying circular arches left by the random orbital hand sander, so at some point I'll have to sand those areas out by hand. Here's a picture of those two baseboards that had to be stripped of paint before they could be sanded (pardon all the dust in the air):

And a close-up of one section of baseboard:

Sunday we put down the sanders and moved upstairs, priming the hallway and south bedroom. Here's the hallway:

And the bedroom:

This bedroom has seen quite a bit of work. When we bought the house there was moisture condensing on the interior side of the stone walls. (A not uncommon problem with stone houses.) This had caused the plaster to fail on portions of the south and west walls, and there were active areas of mold and mildew growth. We scraped the walls back to solid plaster and primed over the walls before our contractor joined the action. He began by patching the largest holes and then skimcoated the entire room. We primed over the skimcoat this weekend.

As the picture above shows, until the permanent furnace is installed we are are keeping the moisture in check with a combination of various fans, space heaters and dehumidifiers. We're hoping our new central heating system will be sufficient to keep the new walls dry. We've increased the amount of heat to all of the upstairs bedrooms, and we have added cold air returns to each room to help circulate the air. Still, we'll be keeping a close eye on all the stone walls upstairs, hoping to avoid a recurrence of the condensation issues.

One final note for this post - I apologize for my habit of repeatedly waiting until after dark to take pictures. I'm not too fond of pictures taken by the light of a flash, but I guess they're better than nothing.