House renovations continued

Where I last left off the house renovations was with the stair and short wall in the dining room. Oddly, I feel like I haven't done much since then, but looking back through what I posted last I suppose I really have done a decent amount of work.

When I ripped out the wall for the plumbing, I also removed the old ductwork that was running to the upstairs bath and a small register for the dining room also. I had never done ductwork before, so it was a learning experience for sure. After a few failures of how to "build" the ductwork, I was able to install a full new run upstairs. No more black lungs (the old duct was DIRTY). The pictures are at the end of this post.

After the ductwork was complete, I decided to rip the basement door out and move it 90 degrees to the top of the steps. This created a nice little alcove type area and hides the basement door when in the dining room and living room. This was of course like all jobs so far, interesting. The light at the top of the steps appeared to be new wiring, yet all they did was take the nob/tube wiring and put a piece of romex sheathing over it. Wooo....fun.

Here are the basement door photos:


After the basement door was complete, it was time to rebuild the wall. Nothing too exciting here other than drywall. It took a bit to figure out exactly what I wanted to do with what was basically unused space, so I opted to install some inset shelves that would house special beer bottles I have collected.

In addition to the drywall, we also wanted to paint the party wall, which required me to re-plaster some areas and then do a skim coat of drywall spackle to even out the rough spots. For the paint, we wanted a texture to make it seem more like masonry so I added a sanded mixture to the base coat. Once it was up, it was WAY too light blue, so we then did a sponge technique on top of that with a darker color.

Below are the pictures of the entire duct work construction and wall rebuilding/painting (along with a few shots of a new case for my antique cameras):


This was all done since September. Well that, and the topic of my next post....the completion of BAR MINNICH....