As Charles Dickens wrote, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..." While that's a bit overstated for today, it kind of felt like that.
Jim worked more in the bathroom (finally...a picture of the pedestal sink!). He said the faucet is quite complicated - more so than any he's put in. But he got it started and it's going to look great.
You can also tell that he moved the smaller baseboard heater that was under the window and connected it to the longer one. If he moved it to the other side like we were originally thinking, that's even more holes to drill in the floor.
Since he was on a roll with baseboard heaters, he attached the first one in the master bedroom...
And also in the living room. (Just as an aside, it's so crazy the way these room colors appear in pictures - they look nothing like this in person!)
Next, Jim did some flooring. He basically has the entryway into the apartment all finished. Here he's screwing in a small spacer just to keep the last piece stable - he'll fill in with scraps later.
There are places he'll have to fill in when he decides how he's going to do door sills but for now it's all done. This was important because we didn't want any damage to the tongues of the flooring by walking on an edge that wasn't finished. Sure looks good!
Then we had to make our secondary keel line that will extend into the second bedroom. So we chalked the line and then Jim went over it in permanent marker. A true testament to Jim's precision - this line again was totally parallel to the walls in the bedroom!
This keel board has to go around the door frame so Jim had to cut out a section on the band saw.
Gluing first...
Putting it in place...
Unfortunately, Jim still has to do the planing of all the joints in the floor before he can proceed farther. This is just a lot of work!
I ordered a new rug for the master bedroom and we wanted to make sure we were happy with it so we decided to open everything up. First the felt pad underneath...
Love the rug! It looks so pretty with the walls and the floor. Of course, now I think we need a new comforter for the bed (and so it goes!).
That was all the good times - everything was taking shape and rolling along nicely. After I left, Jim wanted to work in the bathroom a bit more.
His first task was to work on fastening the bolts of the faucet underneath the sink. Sounds easy but no (well...none of this sounds easy to me). It's so close to the wall that there's no way to get a wrench up to tighten the bolts. But, Jim of course has a specialized wrench (two actually) that are just for this job. However, neither were the right size. After laying on his back trying to get them fastened he gave up and will have to order a new faucet wrench.
So then he decided to work on drilling the holes for the heater lines underneath the baseboard heaters. He wanted to get that done before he installed the toilet. These heaters are basically set up that the Pex comes up one side of the heater, goes across and the return line goes down the other side. He measured where the hole needed to be and, thankfully, decided he'd better go down and see where it would come down through the floor. It turned out that it was right in the middle of the bathroom wall downstairs. Unbelievable. Now what? He had to figure out what he was going to do. There are adapters he can get that basically let the line do a U-turn at the opposite end and then the Pex line would go down in the same area as it came up. When he went to investigate where the line would come through at the end nearest the door, it was basically where Jim had left an opening above the breaker box downstairs. So he figured he could make that work. He started drilling - this is even a bigger hole (I picked up another bit yesterday he had ordered for this job). You have to keep the drill bit wet as it's drilling (similar to our brick/block saw). He said the drilling went really well - quicker than the smaller holes. He was almost done and was using the squirt bottle to spray water when the drill kicked out on him - putting a ding in the wall but also shattering the end of the tile. Jim had to chip away the edges of the tile - it should mostly be hidden by the heater but Jim came home pretty dejected after such a good day. Of course, after his shower he's back to being positive.
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| High 76/Low 44 - beautiful! |
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