A Place to Rest Your Beer

Apologies for the silence of late. We’ve been tied up with contractors, tons of gravel, brewing in the excessive heat, and much more fun. Before we pick up with the renovations I wanted to highlight a small project we recently completed.

Our porch has been bare since we’ve moved in, we carry chairs out, or sit on the steps often, but we’ve long craved something permanent. Every Victorian house needs a picnic table on the porch, right? I didn’t feel like searching craigslist, haggling, and scheduling a time to pick up, so I set out to build one. Thanks to the internet there are plenty of plans available.

I picked up the wood, and really doubted that it would equal a full sized picnic table when I saw it in a pile.

This is after the cuts were made.

The table top came together easily.

The legs went on.

And the rest was easy. Now to get her over to the porch and enjoy a beer.

A sad note, our beloved angle grinder ground it's final edge last night. After finishing all two floors of the pub she just didn't have much life left in her. I'd been holding the cord at just the right angle to make her work lately, and last night she surprised me with a blast of smoke from the cord. You'll be missed, thanks for your service.

Two floors finished, sanding a few 2x4 edges just wasn't in the cards.

A Breakthrough

As tomorrow is the day we begin serious work on the floors in the brewery we think it's a proper time to share this video. The floors in the brewery need to be removed to pour concrete, Gerard and I thought we'd make the breakthrough as dramatic as possible.

The Dust Settles

Our wood floors will never be fit for a gymnasium, nor a ballroom, but they work for a pub, they work for Forest & Main. Each room was a different sanding job. The first room was a breeze, we thought we’d be finished in no time based on that one. Then we got to the entry way which had a strange layer of compressed paper all over. We attacked it with the grinder and filled up several trash bags with paper shreds, the stuff was everywhere…

The entry way floors prior to sanding.The next room had an ancient layer of paint, glue, and who knows what else, all around the perimiter of the room. This nasty mix gummed up our sanders in no time. We scraped, peeled, and sanded, for a long, long time.

With the floors fully sanded we were excited to get them finished. A few coats of poly later and we had ourselves some nice, rustic, wood floors. It was a great stroke of luck that we wound up with floors that matched the character of F & M so perfectly.

The bare wood floors.

Sanded and stained.

And now to pick the wall color...

Of Walls and Floors

Prior to pulling up the carpet we had to spackle and sand just about every room in the house. We also had to pull down some awful fluorescent lights and some track lighting.

Patching the StairwayGerard Hard at Work

With the patching finished we pulled out all of the carpet with the help of some friends. Those carpets were full of dust, we quickly got used to wearing respirators and having plastic sheeting in all of the doors.

Boomer Getting Rid of Some Subflooring.

Our Big Pile of Carpet.With the carpets gone and the walls patched we focused on sanding the floors. As one who enjoys doing things the hard way I decided to do them by hand, with an angle grinder…

This Little Guy is Tenacioius.

Where Once There Was Carpet...

One of our first goals upon getting into the house was to get rid of the carpet. We got right to it and were happy to find some old wood underneath.

Rustic wood floors!