The Berlin Wall

Today Brian and I took down the wall. Two other friends crapped out on me, but I was asking a lot for people to come over on a Sunday afternoon after all the Halloween parties that were happening on Sunday night.

We had fun knocking it down and it only took us 4.5 hours, start to finish with some relief help from Rachel. The amount of material used in plaster/lath construction is amazing! To top it off, it's really freaking heavy! I hope I can slowly dispose of this using city garbage services, but I already had a problem with the paint peeling process in this area and that was about 1/20th of the amount of waste.

Like the pizza and beer, Brian was fully paid with a diner meal and chocolate milkshake. Savings = $2500 by my best guess. I have a feeling this is going to come back to haunt me someday....

All it takes is Pizza & Beer

My colleague/friend Brian Markham, a structural engineer, came over this evening to assess the feasibility of removing the wall between my kitchen and living room. We had a look at a hole a I poked in the ceiling of the foyer to assess the beam spacing. Looks like it is not a load bearing partition, so I should be able to knock it down without a problem.

It's good to have contacts that know something about structures. I fed Brian pizza and beer, which probably saved me $475 or so to have an engineer come out to look at the wall. Thanks Brian!

The goal is to knock out the wall before the electrical work gets done so that the switches and outlets can easily be re-routed to the adjacent walls. I'm aiming to take the wall out and have the electrical work done before Thanksgiving so that my Dad and I can start removing the plaster and lath in the foyer and closets with all the electrical work done.

Order of Operations

So I've had an order of operations for the project in my head for a while, but I'm fairly confident that I've firmed it up now and wanted to share it with you.

1. Strip doors and door frames - Done!
2. Start to get moldings replicated - In progress
3. Remove wall between living room and kitchen - by Nov. 2007
4. Install new outlets in bathroom & kitchen and add recessed lighting to most rooms - Nov. 2007
5. Remove plaster in lath in closets and foyer, replace with drywall - Dec. 2007
6. Refinish closet floors and add custom closets - Jan 2008
7. Remove all bedroom plaster and lath, replace with drywall - March 2008
8. Sand doors and repaint - March 2008
9. Remove all plaster and lath in living room and kitchen, replace with drywall - August 2008
10. Redo Kitchen - Start August 2008, complete Feb. 2009
11. Redo Bathroom - April 2009.

Now that I've looked at the list, it's a big project, but it should be well worth it. Thoughts? Send them my way.

Doors are done, door frames are almost there

Finally, after months, I've finished the doors (yes, two times to strip on each door face!) and a majority of the door frames are finished. Some more work needs to be done on the transom window and front closet, but I think I need a break from that.

My Dad came a few months back and took away the cold storage and dumbwaiter doors with him. He finished up the fine stripping and brought them back primed. They look great and I look forward to getting to that area of the project, although it's probably 2nd to last on the list.

Now, I need to strip the hardware...

Moldings 101

The moldings have soooooo much paint on them, it's not even funny as I previously mentioned. Take a look at the picture and I think you'll get the idea.

And this one isn't even the worst of the bunch.

So, I've ripped out a lot of the molding in my phase 1 area - the foyer, front closet, and bedroom closet. I've also attacked the door casings so I can effectively strip the door frames.

I'd like to keep the charm and the grand scale of the moldings, so having them replicated is important to me. Yet, this is proving to be more of a task then I thought. I took a train ride out to Queens the other morning to a lumber place that does custom moldings, only to have them tell me my order was too small. So much for an hour each way on the 7 train!

Then, a contractor put me in touch with Dyke's lumber, who has a massive catalog of stock moldings...but none of them matched mine. I dropped off my measurements and samples for a custom order quote. If I won the lotto, I'd consider paying them $6,057 for 800' of molding, but that's just way out of my budget.

I've shipped some samples off to my Dad in Michigan to get a few quotes there. I don't need all the molding at once, so if can get it for $2-3k less and then just bring out a few pieces each time he comes, that would be great. As well, I could resell the blades to another owner in the building and make some of the money back....which will just go toward the renovation, but it makes me feel better.

We'll see what the Wolverines say....

Archaeological Digs....in my apartment

So after a long evening of stripper application, I began peeling late this afternoon to find a surprise. There's a transom window above my bedroom door!

Before peeling:


After peeling:


Yup, didn't have a clue it was painted over! So, then I got a bit curious and decided to figure out why my bathroom tiles were slightly raised over the threshold. Sure enough, they tiled over the old original floor tiles.


Then I ripped out the bathroom door casings to find more old tiles behind the wall tiles.


I doubt that I'll save the bathroom tiles, but the transom window will be a cool original feature to keep around.

Too much surface area!

So these doors are really taking a while! One for the front closet, bedroom closet, bedroom and bathroom! It wouldn't be so bad if each door wasn't over 8' tall. I haven't even thought about the door frames yet!