1950 beach house reno: June 2015

We had talked about a floor guy with our very favorite framer Al, and the floor guy is named Benny. There is this underground group of good contractors that don't need to use Angie's list. Word of mouth. Benny is not timely, but he is nice and interesting and very knowledgable.

In addition to the floor looking very good so far, he has been doing floor work since age 8 with his dad. He new almost immediately that we had a type of pine called heart pine. A desirable, on its edge, pine from the 1930's era. Ours is not the best grade, it's called porch grade, but still its heart pine.

He gave me great hints about our ugly stairs, hints on finding a re glazer for our original windows, and hints on how to clean the old window interior frames and baseboards. (Steel wool 00 and mineral spirits, the use Johnson paste wax)

On the stairs he suggested painting them w oil based paint. And possibly tiles or checkerboard on the risers. He suggested a grey, like the beach weathered grey, and then I told him about the replacement of current wallboard w either reclaimed pallet wood or panels of the breadboard.

He also gave me a name of a house builder. One who wants to do a concrete house. He said that a builder doing a new type of house as this would be for the builder will take extra time and special are since it's his first. My thought was no skills w first house, prone to errors and delays, but he seemed to think the opposite. But wouldn't the builder have a HUGE learning curve? I'm not sure I'd want to be his first.

He also shared his heart tumor story with me, it was amazing from a doctors perspective, no typical CAD, but a, most likely, congenital tumor that had grown in his right heart.
He had to have it removed, and the procedure was pretty interesting from the way he described it.

So back to my (our) floor. We decided to get half of the downstairs done just to complete the kitchen. The upper cabinets arrive tomorrow.
They will add two coats of the sealant tomorrow, we will sleep at a hotel because the fumes will be awful. They will do a final coat Saturday. And then Sunday it should be habitable. J will be home Monday. So the timing will be good.

He demo'd the existing tile that had been placed over the floor at the back door. It had a rotten sub floor that he also replaced. It has a cool build in doormat look with some contrasting darker wood. And he fixed the gaps at the fridge and pantry opening.

So here are some pix.