We have the living room looking pretty smart now. All this
morning Karen scrubbed the second half of the floor, then ground it with steel
wool and turps, following which I gave it two coats of wax polish. It looks
very smart now, and with the whole floor done the room looks bigger and more
complete. In the morning I spent quite a bit of time with Mr Antonetti upstairs,
looking at how the satellite and TV cables can be rerouted through his son’s new
rooms, as he is taking the chimney down that our (currently unused) satellite dish
lives on. One slightly concerning moment was when I realised that the
foot-thick stone wall dividing what will be two attic bedrooms above us is
directly over the wall we need to remove and rebuild. From in our place there
is no visible sign of a beam or anything, and there was a moment of anxiety as
we imagined it all crashing down on us. However several hacked holes in the
ceiling later I had located a big iron beam, which has made us happy again. Karen
managed to finish off the skirting painting too.
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| About finished? |
By 5pm we'd had enough of the fumes and being inside, so
headed off on a run. As I got back in, M. Freitas, the builder who is redoing
the roof overhead, came up his scaffold and in the windows to do a quote. Yet
again, another very cheerful and helpful tradesman. The plan with moving our
doors and cutting a new opening is to remove the entire wall and rebuild it in
Placoplatre (plasterboard and steel studs). This will be cheaper and easier
than trying to muck around with the existing hollow clay block wall.
We also learnt a little about the building from him. It
sounds to be a bit over a hundred years old, and was built for a famous French
general and his family. It is a very large building for a single family,
considering there are at least five apartments in this part of it. M. Freitas is
going to get us a copy of the “livre”
or record of the building.
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| Living room floor looking smart |
