Mike and Dave manhandling the ladder plank
Tyvek installed in the peak
Dave uses the "hillbilly crane" to get each piece of siding up.
And the next day they move on to the east side. Steve takes measurements and feeds pieces to Mike, Dave and Eric.
End of the week, all but the peak of the Upper East Side is done. We'll hold off on siding the Lower East Side (AKA porch) until the end since it is good rainy day work.
In my last blog posting I described the deplorable concrete finish job that became more obvious as we tried to finish it and how we decided to go with a "skim coat" to cover the whole thing. The skim coat material took a while to come in, but on Wednesday the floor guys, including Antonio shown below, prepared for a very fast pour.
They brought their own water supply since once you start pouring this self-leveling material you've got to do the whole floor within an hour or less.
First the concrete is primed with an acrylic binder that gets down into the pores of the slab.
And before I finish my lunch and get back with the camera, it was done. The hydrostatic self-leveling material binds through the primer and then kicks off, emitting a sickly-sweet odor that sticks to your nostrils. You could smell it from several hundred feet away, even though the doors and windows were closed.
On Thursday is was fully cured; the only issue was there were a lot of bubble-bumps. These were sanded down, the dust swept up...
And then Justin applied the first coat of watered-down acid stain while Antonio scrubbed it in.
A shot through the window of Justin doing the second coat of pure acid stain in the music room.
Here is the whole floor with fresh stain on it
On Friday morning it was dried and I was freaking that the color wasn't dark enough. Josh at Carolina Concrete Designs sees this reaction all the time and told me we could add stain if it didn't look dark enough when it was washed.
But when the mop was applied it was clear that the color was there.
So they went ahead and applied the acrylic sealer. The fumes from this stuff are also really intense.
On Saturday Arturo applies wax with Antonio smoothing it with a sponge mop.
The finished floor on Sunday morning. There are two coats of wax and we plan on getting one more - the wax layers can take the wear, then it's relatively easy to strip and rewax to keep the floor in top condition.
Those bubbles ended up leaving little pock marks - so when you get up close it's not quite as perfect as it looks here. The color reportedly keeps getting darker for a month or two - I don't mind it but Charla is keeping her fingers crossed that this is so.
On other fronts, I loaded my "dry kiln" with the downstairs jam extensions. I'm hoping I can get them dry enough to glue - which is less than 10% moisture content - right now they are 12% or a bit higher.
Also we received delivery of more than half of the internal door order (also Doug Fir from Rogue Valley Millwork in Oregon), so we have plenty of inside work queued up.
