Finished Floors

I arrived back home from Aspen late last night and didn't get a chance to go to the apartment and see the floors. I went straight away after work today and was so pretty stoked to see how it turned out.

The area around the radiator that needed to be repaired turned out great. I'm also really pleased how it all lightened up nicely too.



Now the floor is done, I'm going to get onto painting. I've scheduled some time with my interior designer friend, Bryant, to talk about paint colors for the whole apartment. I still don't like making these types of decisions so I think I'll leave them to Bryant.

Refinishing Progress

I just got a message from my neighbor who is overseeing the floor refinishing for me while I'm gone. He took a quick snap of the refinished floors in the living room and kitchen. Not going to post it here as I'm sure it's not representative of the real thing, but it looks awesome and I can't wait to see it in person!

Bathroom Progress....Finally

I've been able to get all the framing in the bathroom up this week and it's looking fairly plumb. Like the ceiling, the lathe has come in handy to level out the shower wall. I was concerned about being able to conceal the cold water plumbing. The main riser is by the toilet and runs all the way around the bathroom to the tub and sink, but I seem to have framed it all out just enough to hide all the copper.

The other small challenge was deciding what to do for a medicine cabinet. The surface mounted one looked hideous before and I didn't want to integrate it with a mirror. I've seen some neat ones online that are concealed by a picture frame, but they were too deep for my shallow NYC walls and far too expensive. For the moment I've framed out my an area beside the sink for a custom medicine cabinet when I get around too it. I just need to cut a bit of laminated wood to fit in there, so it should be fairly easy when the time is right.

So now it's time for drywall and tileboard. I'll tackle this over the next few weeks as I'm traveling quite a bit still and I want to use that time to get the floors refinished. Time to start stacking everything into the bedroom! Yikes!

Blackhole Bathroom

After shelling out money to contractors, the major repairs to the bathroom plumbing and flooring is done. I used the same plumber as I had for the work in the kitchen and he finished things off in a day which was great so I didn't loose all my running water in the apartment.

The floor was also done quickly, but a bit trickier. I hired the same contractor that I used to install my recessed lighting back at the early beginnings of the project. His crew were very professional, on time, and clean. They ripped out the whole concrete subfloor and tiling, installed a new standing waste valve for the tub (that's a drain valve if you're not familiar with that term) and poured a new floor all in one day.

The new floor has helped two fold by leveling the floor and sealing up piping penetrations, reducing noise traveling up from the apartment below (not that there was much before, but you can certainly tell the difference).

With the floor and plumbing finished it's time to finish framing out walls for drywall and tile board. The small space and odd brick corners is going to make it a bit tricky and time consuming, but it's nothing that won't be done in a couple evenings and some noisy mornings of sawing and screwing.

Color this, color that

Work on the apartment has been dormant. The plumber is coming soon and it has been made clear to me the bathroom floor is beyond simple repair and will need to be torn up. So, the most recent activity has been making decisions on tile and bath fixtures and counting down the days until I loose the toilet.

This weekend has been filled with making decisions which I don't like to make on bathroom tiles, fixtures, etc. Yesterday I took a trip up to the Bronx to look at tile after a few unsuccessful tries in the city. Luckily, this store had everything I was look for. I picked out a small gray mosaic tile, 1" x 1" for each tile. I'm thinking this with a white or light grey grout will really help the chrome fixtures pop off the walls. The price point is right too, just under $5 per sq. ft. Way better then the stuff I was looking around $20 per sq. ft.

With the tiles picked out, I had to tackle the bathtub spout and valve. In order for my plumber to do the work that needs to be done, this also had to be picked out since a new water mixing valve is needed. So, after looking long and hard at Restoration Hardware, I picked out the following 'vintage' tub spout and handle.


Unfortunately, it was more expensive then all the tile I'll need to do the wall and floor...and the set didn't include the shower head. I'm beginning to understand why bathrooms are so expensive to renovate.

The Joys of the Noise

After returning home from vacation, I received a letter from the building's managing agent that he had received complaints from people in the building I was making construction noise on weeknights and weekends. He kindly reminded me of our stupid construction hours (8 AM - 5 PM Mon-Fri, no work on any public holidays) and stated that further complaints would result in legal action.

I was pretty ticked off at first and rampant that there are so many people who aren't forward thinking about improving our property and their apartments. Here I am, a young 20 something guy trying to make a better place to live and eventually get a nice return on his investment and I've run into so much opposition, it's not even funny.

But then I realized I've gotten away with a lot of stuff the past year. I've sucked all I can out of the NYC Department of Sanitation, done construction on weekends for almost a year now, received my own building permits from the NYC Dept of Buildings and was able to convince the Board of Directors to let me do all the renovations to my apartment on my own (given that I follow regular working hours and raise my insurance....I did the latter). Not bad.

So, if my fellow neighbors can't get it and are whining about noise, then I'll abide by the rules...and ensure that I start any construction which may be noisy at 8 AM. Since my neighbor below me has been the real complainer, I'm sure he'll enjoy power saws, drilling, etc. at that hour.

Ah, the joy of living in NYC.

Bombing the Bathroom

It's been a long week and as you can tell I've been pretty busy. The bathroom has been the focus this week since it's really all that is left in the major construction picture.

So, after cleaning up the mess from the weekend Monday and Tuesday, I dug into the bathroom on Wednesday night. I quickly found that Travis's work over the holidays eased the process since most of what was left was plaster on lath and some tile on tileboard.

The shower wall proved to be the most difficult as the tile was on a greenboard and cementboard in some places.

Friday night I finished up the demo and Saturday was spent bagging what was left up and working on electrical and insulation. Sunday was more electrical which resulted in two trips to Home Depot which took forever compliments of slow work on the A train.

I woke up early today to tidy things up and get ready for Roy to help me hand the ceiling drywall. It took us 2 hours to cut the drywall and hang it with the main challenge being working in such a small space with one person on a ladder in the bath tub, another on a sawhorse and attempting to vault it up around corners and over the steam pipe.

After a bit of struggling, we got it all into place and it feels good to have gone from demo to insulated, re-wired with a ceiling in less then a week.

Still, there is a lot of work to do so I can get a sink back and not have to take baths (I've never taken so many baths in my life as I have this week!). It looks like the plumbing for the bath tub will need to be replaced and the subfloor has holes and oddities around the edges.



I have a few contractors coming this week to look at these elements and give their opinion.

In the meantime, I'll haul the bombed out debris to the curb each night this week and shop for tiles.