cimorene

The carpenters have finished framing a new wall on top of the old rough sheathing to encapsulate the remnants of the asbestos tiles and allow us to hang cabinets, but in the process discovered the floor isn't only tilted in two different directions, it's kinda... wavy... with like sort of puddle-hollows in it, and this would have interfered with the floating floor: the tiles would likely have been prevented from expanding and contracting as one big unit and settled into the contours of the floor, causing them to separate. So they had to level it with concrete last week.

The electricians finished the rough wiring for the kitchen in one day the week before last, but we still haven't seen plumbers again yet. In fairness, the kitchen isn't ready for them yet, but this means they also haven't finished removing the pipes coming out of the spare room floor. We painted in there though (two of three coats?).

We discovered there's actually a plank floor under the fiber board subfloor (which was under nasty cracked 60s vinyl that we already removed), but it's so ripply it would be... either a serious labor of love or quite expensive to sand it down to even, if the whole thing could even be saved (this is probably under the subfloor in our bedroom and under our new floating cork floor too). But we already have the cork for the whole upstairs, anyway. We found an unexpected hearth. The corner next to the chimney stack, in between the two masonry walls, contained an old poured-cement hearth back in the day. Some idiots laid the fiberboard right on top of it without a moisture barrier and then the vinyl on top of that and then they put an extremely sketchy miniature kitchenette on top of it, so the water that made it under the vinyl soaked into and rotted the fiber board because it couldn't evaporate or drain away. I guess fortunately?? Because there was vinyl, or not much water, or maybe because the cement would have retained the moisture for a long time... there wasn't any water damage to the ceilings underneath. That's the first good news we've discovered for quite a while.

The masonry walls are a mess - they'd need a bunch of cracks and chips fixed as well as a bunch of mortar from tiles we pulled off removed. But because the tiles are potentially from the 1960s and hence the mortar can contain asbestos (which we hadn't thought of when we pulled them off the wall), it's better to also encapsulate that wall, which would (even in the absence of asbestos) mean we could avoid having to plaster (or trowel the wall with a similar plaster-like rendering). And of course the cement slab is out of level with the rest of the floor and would require a vapor barrier over it before a replacement subfloor, so it would certainly be easier to... not do that. That's why we're thinking of putting a little closet there, or rather a built-in wardrobe. Which might be bunny bedrooms with some shelves above them.