KAUFlab

new floor 2

Here is the floor (still wet) after wet-scraping. It'd have looked kind of cool polished and sealed this way, but too industrial for our taste.

and here we are starting to lay tile!

While I was at it, I got the gas and wiring for the stove cleaned up:

continued in post 3...

Catching up on some projects I never got around to writing up...
A while ago we finally got the time and energy (and cash) together to replace the kitchen and dining-area floor. It used to be some pretty terrible old linoleum:

First step was to rip up all of that:

Once that was all done, we had to use a wet scraper to scrape off all the mastic and fiber stuck to the floor. An "easier" way to do that is with a surface grinder, but wet grinding makes an awful mess, and you really have to make sure you clean all the dust out of the concrete before you can lay the tile.

continued in the next post...

piano bar update

It's been a long time coming, but I've made some significant progress on the piano over the last few months. Here are some update pics.

Here is the piano all stripped and sanded down, including a bunch of walnut-shell blasting on the detail work. It doesn't necessarily LOOK like it's all de-finished, but that's because the mahogany has such huge variations in pore size (which is what makes it pretty, eventually):

Here it is after a ton of finishing work. This piece is the only one that's done so far, so hopefully the rest of the piano will eventually be this smooth:

The finish process is super labor intensive because the mahogany has a very deep grain. So it takes 10-15 coats of poly, followed by 800-1200-1500-2000 grit wet sanding, then 3 stages of polish, then one coat of car wax. The hardest part is making sure you get enough poly on there that you can sand out all the surface dimples without sanding through the poly. I think MAYBE if I had sealed the surface first this might not be such a bear of a task, but it's too late now!

Anyway, here's the rest of the piano, as it sits at the moment: