Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Score!

Two weeks ago I had a major score salvage-wise. I found about 150 square feet (in real numbers probably 13 sq. m. unless we need to throw away too much laying it) of 1" thick, 12" pine plank flooring, planed on three sides. Originally (i.e. before the morons ripped it out) the boards were glued up to 24" wide planks, almost 15' (4.9m) long! They've been cut into two pieces though. The boards are somewhat worn and at some point they nailed an oak herringbone floor on top of it - using ring shank nails... yuck! That means if we do use the wood we have to flip the boards as the tops are too far gone (ring shank nails seriously crack the wood once you pull them out). The boards are supposed to go into the back hall.

On Monday we took a pile of stuff out to the farm as the plumber was supposed to to some work on the heat system at my grandmother's place and we wanted to check his work. The pine stumps are gone (Mr. Martin managed to line up a backhoe operator who happened to be around and once the stumps were dug out attacked them with a chainsaw).

I started wiring the garden shed, but didn't get done. The worst thing is going to be digging for the feeder. Inside, there's not much going on - a light, a switch and two outlets, everything just screwed to the surface. I guess I'm more than half done and that was just about half an hour of work.

Yesterday my brother and me spent some time digging through the plumber's bid for the central heat. Our best guess: if we do ourselves what we can we get the price down to about half the bid. Besides, he seriously messed up some things - we certainly don't want a radiator that takes up more than half of the exterior wall in the small room for example! Even if we do everything ourselves we need to hire the gas stuff to a licensed plumber, the chimney relining (maybe we can do that ourselves too but not sure, nasty work at any rate and the chimney might need to be rebuilt up in the attic as it curves now) and the boiler installation (a licensed plumber needs to register the new boiler with the gas company).

The kitchen ceiling is likely coming down, we want to have a plaster ceiling there.

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