More Moving Around

NOTE: As of September 23, 2009, this post has been edited in
accordance with a court-mediated settlement. The names of the
contractor and his excavation subcontractor have been replaced with
pseudonyms.

We've spent the last several days clearing all the accumulated junk from the front parlour. It doesn't seem like it ought to be so much, but in fact it included John's bikes, bike stuff, Noel's desk, my studio supplies and the contents of my apartment in San Luis Obispo, and some assorted other junk that got dumped there and left (like a box of papers from when I first went down to SLO two years ago). And we were laid up with unpleasant flu-like symptoms for several days, which took a bite out of the schedule.

So I finally turned my attention to getting the room ready today, willingly sacrificing all nearby rooms in order to get the front parlour ready. Now, while the front parlour is wide open for my plastering work, the hallway looks like this:

Things will be much better when we have our room back.

There are some real challenges in this room, things I'm going to have to work around.

For example, Contractor A (the guy who showed up drunk on the job) removed the chimney chase, which is bad enough, but the real challenge is dealing with the incredibly sloppy drywall job he did to cover it up. I mean, I know I'm all perfectionist about my drywall, but surely half-inch gaps are not acceptable in the trade?

I was considering rebuilding the chimney chase, but now I'm dithering on the subject. I would like to be able to put the replacement fireplace in there sooner than later, but maybe it would be better to resize the chase to fit the replacement fireplace more proportionally than the original would have done.

Anyway.

We also have some gaps open to the outdoors, where the siding is still off the house. I have to come up with some way to keep cold air from rushing in through those, but it may be a losing battle, anyway, given the condition of the windows.

The plastering work I had done has been damaged by the movement of the house during the construction. You can see here that the tape wrinkled: I'm going to have to pull it off, clean the seam, and re-do it. In the back parlour, several seams have similar wrinkles, and one pulled right apart: I'm going to have to fix those, too.

I swear, the light in that room is the weirdest light in the world.

Technorati Tags: plaster, renovations, victorians

posted by ayse on 08/30/06