onward, hallway!

back to work!!! it seems that our various breaks, slacking, travelling, and concentrating on other things is over, or at least we're focusing back on the house again. last week we had a planning meeting at the kitchen table, and came up with a rough-ish plan for work on the duplex apartment. that's the one we live in together. so yes, we'll be renovating it while we live there. jealous?

this weekend, we tackled the hallway again. thabo did some drywall and trim work, and the trim painting continued in the front foyer area. also worked on stripping some pieces of the stair treads that fit around the bannister spindles. i'll post a photo montage of that whole process in a few days for a start-to-finish look at it.

we've also got a few broken spindles in the bannister. luckily, thabo's grandfather is a woodworker, so we're hoping to ask him to make a few replacements for us. i think that would add some good karma to this house, to have as much family input and ancient wisdom in the work as possible.

tapas and friends...

lull in the action, recap on flood

not much has happened since the last post. we've all taken a much needed break to focus on other parts of our lives, and to just rest a minute and not do house work. it's been really nice not to come home and change into work clothes and start on a house project right away.

oh, there was a small disaster; we had a night of really heavy rain a few weeks ago that flooded subways and a lot of basements. we checked our basement a few days later (why a few days later? umm....), and it was dry. THEN, a few weeks later, we realized a lot of our boxed belongings that were on the basement floor had wet and moldy bottoms. so, evidently our basement did flood, then drained, and we let it sit there and get good and moldy. ruined some books and (worse) personal photos. had to spend a night cleaning that up and trying to salvage photos. very depressing.

the plan is to continue working and finishing up the hallway, then we'll tackle the bottom two floors. but first, we have to figure out what we're going to do down there...