Out of the Hedge, Into the Heather.

Levi: Today was a big day. Our new (to us) door arrived! It came to us from a salvage place in Scranton, NJ. That's practically a foreign country as far as I'm concerned. Lauren unwrapped it quite excitedly. 

Levi: Once we set it up in place we realized it's gonna look real nice. After some sanding, cutting, patching, straightening and cursing, of course.

The green square above the door is the old transom that was painted(!) at some point before it was buried in the wall.




Lauren: I keep waffling on what to do with it. It looks like beautiful wood underneath but the thought of trying to strip all that paint out of all the cracks sounds terrible. Right now I'm planning on lightly sanding it and painting it white. Levi would like a color on the outside. Grey bricks, white trim, green or blue or navy door..... thoughts? 

We set up some sawhorses for Lauren to work on. She's got mad sanding/scraping skill.

Shopvac put to good use.

Levi: On a different note, one of my tasks is to get this monstrosity of a boiler out of here. It's taking up all the useable space in the basement/crawlspace and it's right in the way of where I want to put house jacks for floor leveling. It's got to go. 

Levi: This is the crawlspace. After I cleaned it. It may still need some work.

Levi: If you want to be a pro, you got to use the right tools. I used an oxy-acetylene torch to cut all the thin sheet metal away. 

The old cover is pretty neat.

 Levi: I was pretty annoyed with these stairs leading down to the basement. They were all cocked to the side and skeewampus. So I removed them.

You can see the level of not level.

There's some very sketchball framing to try to hide the sagging floors.

This is the supporting lumber of the stair platform. Yes, I'm referring to the chunks I'm holding and all over the ground.

Levi: Because of the level of rotten wood, I need to rebuild the whole platform for the stair I pulled out. However, I'm putting it on the backburner while I deal with the sagging floors. I don't want to rebuild the stair, just to have them crooked once I level all the joists around them.

Lauren: We ran into our home inspector today at the bank. Tomorrow his "guys" are coming over to help Levi move the boiler out. And our other helper Alonso is coming to work on the never ending to do list. Slowly but surely we are making progress!