Progress continues across the street at my Office of Multiplicity. Currently, while Lonnie is past due for his usual southern migration because of health issues with Kathleen and his mother, my neighbor and renter, Roger, is doing some of the work. He is installing the bamboo flooring and has only one room remaining - the sun room addition on the back of the house.
The biggest hurdle besides time on this project is overcoming the many design and installation booby traps left by Lynn. She left the crown molding unfinished in the living room, bathroom and sun room. Because she had not installed the kitchen cabinets, there was no crown molding there yet.
I was very intimidated by the need to finish that aspect of the remodeling job. If you look on the Internet, crown molding installation is the most difficult kind of finishing work. You have to cut the corners on a compound mitre saw, and some of the cuts are upside down and backwards. I don't normally do visual/tactile puzzles at all, so this is absolutely my least favorite type of work.
We discovered that the molding Lynn installed was upside down. That means I had to continue with it in that mode, but this turned out to be the least of our concerns. Some of her mitre cuts turned out to be at very odd angles, making it difficultt to start the next run. Some pieces of molding didn't quite extend into the corners of the rooms, which made it hard to install the next piece without leaving a gap. Some of the pieces were not installed at the correct angle in relationship to the wall and ceiling, which made it impossible to install the next piece correctly. The ceiling, even in the room that she and her husband built is very uneven, which made the molding bend and difficult to nail in place. Because of the incorrect construction of the pantry unit, there was a 1/4 inch gap between the top of the pantry and the edge of the crown molding. Roger removed the pantry again, installed flooring under it, and reinstalled it 5/8" higher, eliminating the spacing problem.
This past weekend, I also hired my former student Chris Faas to reorganize and clean up the workshop. It had been rather badly treated by Lynn, as she dumped out plumbing fittings and failed to replace them in their bins, stacked building materials, and generally left a mess behind after using the work space. Chris spent 13 hours over two days working a miracle there. He has a gift for organization, and he's quick to throw out junk, even when the temptation is to keep it "because we might use it some day." Good job, Chris!!!
The current goal is to have the last of the flooring in and the crown molding caulked and painted by the end of the Thanksgiving weekend.
