The Ancient Basement–Projects in Process

Posted bycathyboettnerPosted inBasement renovation, RenovationsTags:, , , ,

Work has continued here, but there isn’t much to show just yet.

My husband took the last two weeks of the year off as vacation, which is good, because he worked a crazy number of hours over the prior 4 months. He spent a lot of time in the woodshop until the kids got home on the 26th. He was able to get a bunch done including:

Getting all the treads and risers for the stairs assembled and sanded to 100 grit on the sanding table that he ended up buying after sanding the first stair tread for a couple of hours and making minimal progress. I would take a photo of them, but they just look like a pile of lumber.

He made the door frames for our son’s closet doors that I found up in Ohio. Then we stripped them, scraped them, sanded them, and primed them and my husband put them in the frames ready to install at our son’s house for our his birthday gift. Our son was surprised and really pleased not to have to do that. (This was a REALLY nice gift because it was probably 40 man hours of work.)

This is the photo of the closet doors that I found for our son in the store. He asked me to find 4 really narrow antique doors that all matched. I was amazed I was able to find them.
These are the doors and the frames with the last coat of primer, ready to assemble. Frames are on their sides to the right.

He sanded the skirt boards and I primed them and then he got the skirt boards cut to length and installed. It’s amazing how much of a difference they already make in how the stairs look. He also took the pine treads off and planed them all flat which is why they look new.

My husband was out of town last week, so I asked him to take the 3 canning closet doors off their hinges so that I could strip the last of the paint off of them. (We had already scraped them mostly clean, but any finish left on the doors gums up the sandpaper and leaves marks, so they really have to be completely finish free before we sand them.)

The top door is the last one I did, so it’s still wet. We’ll let these dry completely, and then we’ll get them sanded well all over on the next nice day we have and finally get them finished, put their hardware on them, and hang them back up. I have been pushing to finish up projects because I really don’t want to get to the end and have a mile long punchlist of little things that need to be done.

I have more doors in progress right now for the bathroom and for the utility room, but you’ve already seen a whole post on what it takes to get a door from start to finish. We are going to use what was meant to be an exterior door for the bathroom–it has a window, so we’ll have to add privacy glass. The glass is broken in it, so we were going to have to replace it anyway.

My husband came home sick from his trip, so we haven’t gotten much of anything done this weekend.

More to come.

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