The Delaney House
It's been a while since I've written in the blog, but I was starting to feel that it was getting...well, dull. How many times can I say "Tom's pulling pex for plumbing and I'm pulling romex for wiring"? We need to have something that is more tangible, something that grabs the reader's interest.
Hopefully, the picture above will help. We are finally making some serious progress on finishing the outside of the house. The east, west and south facades are mostly done and have been painted, but the front, the side that faces the street and has the most detail, has been the one side that has needed the most attention. Now that is underway, and it's looking really good. The gable has been primed, the fascia at the roofline has been painted. Soon Dale and her crew will return to work on finishing the prep on the second floor, and to prime and paint the first floor, with its new trim.
Tom Pedemonte and his crew have been working on finishing the front of the bay this week. It's been great to see it finally coming together.
We also finally have the double doors onto the back patio installed (even though we don't yet have the patio in place). And the fence along the driveway is done - we still have many more feet to go along the back yard, but the main section (where we needed the fence to keep people from tripping over the change in height between our driveway and the neighbor's drive) is done.
The driveway and fence
Inside, there has been much progress. The rough wiring is done: the two subpanels have been installed and hooked up, all the romex is in place, and runs to all the new outlets and lights. The house has 21 circuits - a big improvement over the one circuit it had (and that being old knob and tube wiring) when we bought the place.
In the bathroom, we have a working toilet and two working sinks (so far, just cold water). Light fixtures have been rewired and reinstalled upstairs, and we've been rehanging doors, fixing broken doors and finding missing trim.
The plumbing is also almost done, and Bill Rayno is working on installing the hydronic heating system. Once the heating loop is in on the first floor, we'll pour the concrete floor, then put plywood and a finish floor over it. Soon we'll be able to start closing up the walls, and then we'll be really getting down to finish work: plastering, trim, painting, refinishing floors. We've even started doing some landscaping, and we;re hoping to bring in some good topsoil starting this weekend and begin actually making the place look finished.
Things continue to be hopping on 62nd Street. There was a shooting at the corner store on Friday - we still haven't gotten all the details - but the neighborhood continues to change and improve. More people are fixing up their houses, and the houses on 62nd, like much of South Berkeley, are wonderfully diverse. Even the pink apartment house next to our house is getting a makeover, and it appears it will soon be a much more pleasing shade of green than the flamingo pink it has been for years. Christine, our neighbor who owns the house on the other side of us, is fixing up the upstairs unit, and should have new tenants in there soon.
We'll be out there again this weekend, getting the plumbing and wiring ready for inspection, and starting insulation of the first floor walls. Once we pass that inspection, the walls can be closed up downstairs, and the rooms will really take on definition. More pictures to follow.
