04.17.12.: Week 10| Recap

After the brief hibernation, week #10 was one of action!  I can’t begin to describe how excited I was when the contractor sent me this photo of all the trucks parked outside.  Trucks outside means people working inside… and being that much closer to rental ready!  Check out this week’s photo log of events.

In the top floor loft, we’re going to leave the beams exposed… but between steel mill soot, raccoon poop, and the various other lovely things you find in ceiling cavities, they were pretty gross.  We thought hard about how to clean them… pressure washing wasn’t an option because all the water would ruin the existing plaster we want to keep.  Sanding them was an option but would have been a nasty mess.  So in the end we decided to have them corn-cob blasted.   Yep you heard that right… corn cobs!  And they look amazing.  Before this, these beams were a dusty shade of black.  Now they look pretty much new!  You can also see in the photo below the new HVAC ducts we had to install.  The old ones ran through the stairwell, which is a big code no-no, so we had to re-route everything to go around.  Looking at it now I’m wondering if we should have gone for an exposed spiral duct… Hmm.  Something to keep in mind for next time.

While they were at it, the contractor had the corn cob guys go through and clean the exposed brick too.  It did a pretty good job of removing the initial layer of plaster.  I went back for more over the weekend and buffed out the chimney my brother started a few weeks ago.  I still have to go back in and hand scrub it, but it’s looking pretty snappy.

The start of HVAC work meant the installation of all new furnaces.  Although 2 of the 4 were in fine working order, the inspector insisted that all be replaced.  That was annoying, but not that big of a deal.  Our contractor had planned on it, and hopefully that means we won’t have any problems with them anytime soon!

We are also adding central air to each unit… which meant we needed to upgrade the electrical service as well.  Even though we had a very nice neat setup in the basement we still had to move the meters outside.  This brings me back to the whole thing last fall about the &*^*#% gas meters, remember that?  Ugh all I can do is shake my head at this point.  Alas, we’ve got more meters outside.  Special thanks goes out to the City of Pittsburgh and Duquesne Light for the beautification of your local streetscape.

Other work that happened outside was………. blowing more walls out!  My favorite.  Really.  Every time I think the exciting stuff is done, another big one comes along.  You see, all of the windows on the first floor got filled in at some point with smaller ones.  I would have loved to have blown every last one of them back out to the original size, but with budgets and all you’ve got to choose your battles.  So, for now we’re just doing the one in the front apartment because it really, really needed some light in there.

And finally, on the outside we got the concrete deck poured.  I had originally wanted to do the deck out of steel grate, but it was cost prohibitive… so the  concrete will have to do.  Looks good though!

There you have it for week #10… all action, no slackin.’  Or something like that.  Stay tuned for more updates next week.