Some progress since last post

Since our Feb. 17 post, some progress has been made. Both of our digital cameras are misbehaving, which caused technical problems in posting pictures. So we have decided to mobilize M's old single relfex lens camera. OK, where are we now? Due to the fact that the basement underpinning permit is taking so long to come out (we are still working on it as of now), we are forced to work in areas other than that. Will got enough framing done that we got an additional draw on our loan; that got Don the HVAC guy and Richard the plumber started. The French door got installed (yay - light) and the wood historical replication windows have been delivered. Don has cut holes in floors, removed some brickes in the basement and put in some rigid and some flexibe ducts and several of the air outlets. The flexible ducts are snaking around loose in the ceiling area in a rather cool manner. The plumber has placed the all-important waste drain pipes from the second floor down, including the toilet flange in the MBA. OK, these are the things that are being done by our "guys". What are we doing?

We prepared the window frames for the new wood windows. We scraped 130 years of paint off of the 130-year old yellow pine frames, which are still smooth as can be in most places. We had to fill some gouges made by the masons grinders when they were removing the old mortar. Then we caulked the joint between the the frame and the bricks and put on primer. All this was pretty easy becasuse we could remove the plywood and stand in the window without a ladder. Real windows soon!

With some misgivings (by E) we decided to expose the bricks along the staircase in the first and second floors, and in the powder room. We chiseled the plaster off the brick; first by hand in the powder room, then using Will's hammer drill (the "Boschammer") for the larger areas along the stairs. The hammer drill is faster. After the plaster is off the tedious work of cleaning each brick with wire brushes began. It is slow but is looking great. We will have pix of that after the dust settles! We also painted a test area of bricks with clear satin polyurethane, which we will apply to keep the old mortar from crumbling forever. The polyurethane darkens the brick a little and makes the mortar more yellow, but it doesn't look like plastic. It will probably take us 20 hours or more to clean and protect the bricks. Fortunately, the mortar is good enough that we don't need to patch it. One cool thing is that we found little clumps of horsehair mixed into the plaster. This was the way the old guys added strength to the plaster and kept it from cracking.