I finished framing the short wall that will divide the dining room and
kitchen today. The taller wall is screwed into studs in the center
wall of the house, the short part of the L is screwed to the taller
wall and the floor, and the OSB is glued and screwed to the framing.
Once the glue set, this was very solid. It should hold the upper
counter top with no problem. We plan to use some 1/4-inch steel to
support the cantilever on the dining room side.
Here are a few pictures showing the current state of the dining room
and kitchen.
Over the last few days, I spent some time in the backyard tearing up
the ugly grass.
I'll let it sit like this for a while, then when it is dry enough I'll
turn it over again to break the clumps up some more and then it will
be time to plant some new grass that will match the rest of the yard.
Tonight we pulled wire for the outlets that will be in the new wall
between the dining room and kitchen and put sheetrock on it. This is
starting to look like progress.
This wall is small enough that I could have covered each side
with no joints in the sheetrock, but unfortunately we didn't have any
more full sheets left over from the ceiling project and a full sheet
won't fit in the car. Since only two sheets were needed for this
little project, it didn't seem like it would be worth it to rent the
Lowe's truck or pay for delivery. So I cut the sheets to 3 feet and
loaded them in the back of the trusty wagon. It'll be a little extra
work to finish the wall but in the end I don't think anyone will
notice.
The light spots on the floor that you can see in the far left of the
first picture above are places where I sanded the floor with a palm
sander just to see whether the spots and dirt would sand out easily
(or at all). The good news is that it looks like the floor is going
to clean up really well. We hope to be refinishing floors in a few
weeks.
Here's the divider I made out of maple and walnut to go around the
hearth, along with the tile that we will be installing someday (soon,
I hope, but at this point, I'm not counting on it as there are so many
other more important things to do).
We also removed some worthless return air ducts in the basement and
uncovered some more notched floor joists. Idiots!
Some wall patches. The first one was a bit of a pain since it was
difficult to tie any wood into the brick in this spot. I finally
managed to get something wedged in. We'll just have to remember not
to hit this part of the wall very hard.
I also pulled off the top layers of sheetrock from the soffit in the
kitchen, revealing some lovely (and original to the house, I think)
wallpaper.
We have the first coat of paint on the walls in the dining room.
Hostas are coming up!
We rented a sander today and started working on the floors in the
second bedroom.
By the end of the second day, we had the floors in the den and the
second bedroom sanded.
