First lounge, nearly finished. At last!

Sometimes I can't help thinking progress has been slow, but it's interesting to look back the last 2 weeks and see how far we've come, or even further back to how the house was when Shinobu & Arnie began demolishing interior walls, or replacing exterior wood paneling and where we are now.

There are so many pieces to each puzzle it's difficult not to miss all the tasks that go hand in hand with finishing each area properly. I tend to under estimate, being inexperienced & sometimes need to remind myself this is an old house so it's not all square and symmetrical as a modern building would be.
Arnie often has to engineer solutions on the go and in turn I've been learning various techniques from him.

It's encouraging to look back just the last 2 weeks and review how many things have changed!



The above picture shows the old ceilings, raw wood planks that sat beneath tatami and below - no wall to separate the bedroom, back in April:



During the last two weeks, having routed all our wiring, inclusive of wall mounted speaker terminals with 12 gauge speaker cable hard wired in, Phone, LAN and digital TV, we sealed up the wall with plaster board. If I've worked it out right, we should have no visible cables anywhere running alongside the walls once we've furnished the place.

There are two spot light (dimmable) circuits, plus switched wall receptables for floor or table lamps and wiring in place for picture lights to be located on the wall.

During late nights into the last two weeks I spent time painstakingly laying oak flooring, carefully glueing and nail gunning each strip into place after spacing correctly.



Sanding followed, with a darker (Mahogany) stain:



This afternoon before finishing up for the weekend, I applied a 50% thinned first coat of Eurethane varnish after having vacuumed & wiped the floor clean with a damp microfibre cloth thoroughly. Note there's a lot of reflection on freshly varnished wood, it's not texture.





It'll get at least 4 coats of Eurethane with more sanding in between. Should have a classic look when done, similar to the stairs (See other post today).

Sanding (With our trusty Dyson vacuum cleaner attached to suck away dust) and varnishing don't take long to do, so I'll finish these in between others stuff I'll be doing over this month. Where the original ceiling slats used to fit, we'll be putting a facade over and slightly above, to hide the wiring for the spots and speaker by the corner.
I'm looking forward to re-fitting the beautiful wooden lattice panels that seperates this lounge & bedroom and allows ventilation! The green plastic sheeted temporary windows will soon be gone at last. Once it's finished, I can paper the shoji doors too but before I get onto that, there's some panels in the corridor that need painting and wood re-staining. Rome wasn't built in a week, as the saying goes...