more sanding.

check out the stairhole shot! the black post is the center column for the spiral stairs that we will install.

sanding floors

today, my sister heidi and bro-in-law rod and nephew-most-awesome mason drove up (at 5am no less) from PA and spent the day helping us sand floors and expose a brick wall. wow, did they get a lot of work done! we sanded three floors and cleaned plaster from a brick wall, and i think they still made it back to PA by 8pm. plus, my dad picked up our spiral stairs for us in Philly, and they brought them up on their truck. big day for us today. big day. thanks family!

check out the fireplace in the first pic. melissa has put a bunch of elbow grease mixed with baking soda and eye of newt into bringing back some of its luster. many poultices were applied, and the cement/plaster middle is going to get a fresh coat of paint. it won't look perfect, but it will look a lot better than it did, thanks to melissa. plus, if it looked perfect, i'm not sure it would fit in this house...

painting the duplex living room

leigh anna came over last sunday and helped us do a bunch of painting. she's awesome. this room was a pretty depressed gray color; we think maybe it was an attempt at "off-white." it had a debilitating effect on the psyche.

he came from under the stoop...

thabo builds a sink.

bedroom floor part deux

the floor went together fairly easily and quickly, and made the room look much nicer. cindy and i promptly moved in. it's tight, but it's clean and private, which is saying something.

bedroom floor

this is from a few weeks ago, too. scott and i laid this bedroom floor, with a pergo-type product. the pine boards weren't in good enough condition to refinish here, and the pergo won out over carpet. scott is a natural at this, just look at his poise and grace.

thank goodness for good friends.

some pictures from a few weeks ago, when our good friends adriana and scott came over for a saturday and helped us paint and lay flooring. we heart them and it was really nice to get to spend a day with them. so much of this house has been made better by friends and family lending a hand....kind of like an amish barn raising, except in brooklyn and not a barn. so far, no actual amish either.

chowtime

i took some pics of us eating lunch on saturday, in a room filled with dust and construction tools. it struck me that this was something that would be important to remember; these makeshift and tasty meals that one of us throws together quickly so the rest of us can keep working. we eat together often, and i think we all enjoy it quite a bit. sometimes, we light a candle so we feel fancy.

but, point a camera at these people and this is the kind of picture that comes out. once we're done with this house, i think we should post at least one picture in which we're wearing clean clothes, and not looking tired and half-crazed. to balance out the perception that we're creating here, that we're, you know, unclean, tired, and half-crazed.

there's gold in them there walls! gold, i say!

painting pocket doors.

dreaming of a tree.

yesterday we put a call in to the city of new york, and requested that a tree be planted in front of our house. it looks like there used to be one there, and the houses on each side of us have trees in front, but ours does not. so we called 311, and requested one through this program. hopefully, sometime this year, a tree will magically appear, courtesy of new york and mayor bloomberg.

late entry: working on bathroom/hall joists

here's thabo, making sure our house doesn't fall down. so far, so good.

staining more doors

lots of staining happened this weekend. four wood doors, both sides, two coats each.

cutting linoleum the easy way.

linoleum floor

after we took up the tile we patched a bad joist, put down a subfloor, and then some linoleum. this part of the hallway will be a laundry room/work sink, so we decided it didn't need to be too fancy. linoleum for now. we had to roll the glue out from under it. unfotunately, it didn't work to well because we hadn't screwed a layer of the floor down well enough, and thabo and melissa had to peel this up and do it again tonight. always use a lot of screws.