Working on the 3rd Floor
Rebuilding a Beautiful, Vacant Historic Detroit Home (Episode 17)
Sub-Flooring Is Back In The Master Bathroom
This past week has involved a lot of tightening up of some loose ends. We quickly worked to finish up electrical in the Master Bathroom. This allowed Christian to re-install new sub-flooring. It’s great to be able to walk around the room with ease again! Soon we should be able to have our inspections which will then allow us to install insulation and drywall.
The 3rd Floor
Brandon and I began tackling the 3rd floor with a little more gusto this week.
The removal of wallpaper is our first step in this space. The large area rug was removed from the floor along with all the junk right after we purchased the home. I quickly peeled off the outer layer of the plastic 70s wallpaper so that only the paper backing remained. We then used a remover called “Chomp” from Home Depot and sprayed it onto the walls and began scraping. It was taking me a while to remove each panel of backing, but Brandon quickly developed his own technique of slowly peeling of the packing in one large sheet that seemed to work the easiest and without as much back-breaking labor.
The Chomp remover worked really well. Our biggest problem with it was that the smell of this stuff really gets to you quickly. It burns in the back of your throat and the orange smell quickly proves it self to be more of a toxic smell than a clean smell. We had to work hard to bust one of our room’s windows open that likely hadn’t been opened in 10 or more years so that we could get some ventilation into the room. After getting this window opened, we got to enjoy the wonderful 3rd floor view this bedroom has.
We currently have about 1/2 of this room’s wallpaper completely removed, so we’ve still got a ways to go on the 3rd floor with the bathroom, nursery, and hallway still to be done.
Tack-Strips
Next Brandon got to work with removing tack-strips from the 3rd floor wood where there used to be carpeting. Things moved along pretty easily so we’re one step closer here to being able to refinish these floors. We still need to decide our strategy on this space, since there is some small amounts of floor damage left from the water and our nursery’s floor is covered in old glue and has been previously sanded but not refinished.
Our Journey isn’t over! We’ve been working hard since we purchased the home in November 2016 and are writing updates on our progress roughly every week. Make sure to check out our latest updates on our homepage!
