Gooood morning America! That's right, I'm back home in the states and have a BIG couple of updates that I'll be posting over the next couple of days. Over the summer, posting anything here has been hard with dodgy internet and a general lack of time or energy to do so. My last post may seem a bit weird and short, but that is because I was actually able to get Weebly long enough to post anything and I knew it wouldn't last, so I made the post short and to the point.. Kinda.. The post, however, serves as a good segway into what the heck I have been doing all summer. So without further ado, I will explain just what I have been up to. Like I said in the last post, I have been doing a LOT of construction work. Over the summer, the big project for my family was to fix the dining room in our house. It had so many problems from wall damage to black mold, and that was supposed to be the place we eat! My mothers naive goal was to have this done in under 2 weeks with everyone working nonstop for the entire duration. That did not really happen, so we ended up spending a month working down there for about 5 or 6 hours a day. When we started, this is what the room looked like (minus the dinning room table which had already been moved out in this shot). If you can see, on the back wall there is what looks like one big black crack. That is no crack, that is the black mold creeping up from the wooden trim piece that lines the floor of the dining room. The real cracks are underneath the poor plaster job the previous owners of the house made. The outer facing side of that wall is just dirt because our house was built into a hill. The problem with that is the wall is not properly ventilated, so all the moisture makes more mold and weakens the wall further. What we actually did during that month of construction included moving all the furniture (minus the giant cabinet and armoire) out of the room, tearing down all the plaster from the walls, repair broken limestone, remove all the wooden trim, re-plaster the walls (3 separate times because we kept finding old plaster that would peel off), demolish an old fireplace that had been plastered over, paint all the walls and ceilings (WITHOUT touching any natural wood, that was a very important step for my mother), repaint the door frames, buff the floor, and replace all the furniture in that room. Sounds simple enough right? Not really. We had many setbacks throughout like not having the right paint mixed for the job or realizing that we couldn't just plaster over the wall because the old plaster and paint peel right off and so does our nice plaster. We had to learn that lesson twice. Can't say that it didn’t pay off though, because the final product is much better that how I imagined it would be. For me, this part of the summer was kinda fun because it was something to do as well as a being a job that I was payed for. I must say though, the highlight of this experience for me was sawing through solid stone even after being told by a professional carpenter that it was not possible.
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AuthorMy name is Anna Marshall, nice to meet you! check out the 'about me' page for more information about me! Archives
May 2018
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