Urbanspace Lesson No. 0003: Don’t give a contractor his final payment until his work is totally, completely done. Even if the guy’s a friend… bummer on that one.
The first wave of demo is done, although not exactly to the level we paid the guy for. We’ve pretty much accepted that we’re going to have to finish it off for ourselves, and have the General Contractor do the rest when he comes on-board. In the meantime, we took a break from fervious drafting to do a little real-world labor, so we could feel a little better that something physical is happening too.
We have been playing with the ideas of exposed brick, but were unsure of how much work that would actually take. We experimented and chipped, by hand, most of the plaster off of one of the small chimneys in an upstairs bedroom. “We” meaning mostly Jason because it turns out I am pretty worthless at chiseling. After about 2 hours of work, about 20SF were exposed and it looked pretty good.
This weekend we sprung for a Rotary Hammer w/ a Chisel bit and… wow! It’s kind of funny now that we did any of it by hand. We went into Loft 1R (the tiniest of the bunch) and that thing practically melted the plaster right off. The progress below happened in about an hour:
Small changes like this really seem to make a big difference- I swear I could feel the whole building’s spirits lift as it breathed a sigh of relief!
urbanspace llc 
Wow, that looks great! Bring on the muriatic acid!
Jason stiffed you huh?