A thin carpet reveals imperfections in the floor underneath. I wish we'd known that before putting in thin carpeting in the basement, with it's uneven concrete pad.
Those new carpet fumes are pretty powerful. Tough in the winter when you can't air the place out.
Carpet installation is a rough process. We're working through a few repair items with the installers right now.
We're scrambling to get some last-minute painting done before the carpeting comes in on Wednesday.
It turned out that the carpet we chose for the stairs won't go around the posts very well - the berber loops would get cut and frayed. The stairs were left rough in anticipation of carpet covering them. John Martin (Jackie's husband) offered to finish off the stairs, smoothing down the rough edges and adding some molding. He did a great job, and now we're getting some paint down.
The first coat went well.
The non-merlot walls in the music room get a fresh coat of white paint today. I need to get all that gear out of there anyway before the new carpet comes.
Steve's going to engineer a way to sneak a new grille screen behind the warped one without pulling the panels out completely. Hopefully that will take care of the problem... though once we turned the radiator on a few of the other grilles showed a little more warping as well...
The possible actions from here:
a) the new carpet smooths out the color around the grille and we just don't notice the waves - right now the checkered floor is exacerbating the problem
b) we paint the grille material a less-shiny color
c) we get new inner frames for the panels - maybe a rectangle of quarter-round molding with a stronger grille material behind, slid in and nailed into the openings.
It's too bad - I like the look as it is. Stupid weak metal.
We're ready to wrap this thing up today... but wait.
The metal grille in the new radiator covers is not as sturdy as the original material and it buckled in spots when the heat turned on. Where Steve was able to access the panels in time he added extra screws, which took care of the problem in those spots. But there's one panel that's killing me - it looks warped and defective.
The panels are nailed, glued and stained. It would be traumatic to pull them just to rescrew the remaining screens. Steve tried epoxy in spots yesterday. It worked on most of the sceens but that last one is not responding.
We can't let this just go. I think we'll be holding some money back until this gets resolved to our satisfaction. I have an idea of how to do it without ripping out the wood but I'll see what Steve has to offer...
I so wanted to be done today.
We could be wrapped up with all the construction by Friday.
Steve had to fill in one more wavy wall this week. He did a good job.
All the gear that filled the back room for the last six months is gone.
Carpet next week.
The door knobs and handles are up.
We're pretty much there... I'm not quite ready for the big retrospective, but this is what that corner looked like when we started this process...
