Saturday, March 12, 2016

Patching Holes

Over the years we had to poke holes in the walls and ceilings to do various projects in the attic and second floor.

This one is for the plumbing stack in the attic and shares the wet wall with the laundry room on the second floor.  It's a good thing we never liked the wall color here...

This one wasn't a hole so much as it was hidden by the cupboard that's now in the master dressing room.  The ceiling plaster was falling off and the cupboard was plastered in place.  The edges all need to be feathered into the remaining wall.

I also need to finish feathering in where the old linen closet entrance and butler's bedroom doorways were.

This one was for the toilet and showers in the master bathroom.

And this pair was for the gas line for the attic HVAC, along with the plumbing stack for the master bath tub and sinks.

Now that everything is done upstairs, we can close these and start painting.

Sunday, March 6, 2016

Dumpster Diving

In my previous post, I went into the pile of saved molding from elsewhere in the house.  I sorted through all of it to find the pieces I needed for the closet interiors.

As we have only the hallways and kitchen remaining, it's easier to see what we need to save and what we can dump.  We had a bunch of other construction debris along with other random bits of stuff collected by previous owners. They included radiators and doors, it was clear neither of which were ever installed in this house; they didn't match any that are still installed.

So we rented a 10 yard dumpster and filled it up last weekend.

At one point on Saturday as we were carrying stuff out and chucking it in the dumpster, several neighborhood folks paused to check on things or just chat.

Some called friends who came to turn our trash into their treasures, others offering advice about the few bucks we could get by recycling the cast iron from the radiators, others still about leaving things out of the dumpster so the metal recyclers could get to it.

Here are my thoughts:

  1. If it's in the dumpster and you want it, be my guest.
  2. The going rate for scrap iron is $100 per long ton.  So if you want to haul 600 pounds of radiators to the scrap yard so you can get $25 bucks, you know where to find it.
  3. I'm only touching this stuff once. I'm hauling it out of the basement and throwing it in the dumpster, not putting it on the boulevard to see if someone takes it and then later putting it in the dumpster.  See #1.
By the time we called the company to pickup the dumpster a couple days later, some of the stuff had been turned into treasures...