Pulp Path

Pulp Path

First lesson, Nor’easters can go for a long time! We pretty much got wind strewn rained on for a good three days straight last week. When I say rained on, the Pulp Deck outdoor project was fairly drenched. Even the parts that are covered still got hit with extremely humid conditions, aka, the caulk and fills were not quite holding so well.

Next lesson, when it rains on your project, you pivot to another one (or two)! And that is exactly what we did. Quick catch up, we’ve brought in our most trusted painter extraordinaire, Gil, to handle the caulk and paint portion of the Pulp Deck columns, ceilings and trim, as it is quite a bit of work and simply put, he’ll get it done faster than we could ever hope to do it. But, as mentioned, the extreme wet conditions have pushed that timeline back a tad, so we decided to tackle a few of our other pending projects, in this case, the Pulp Path and the Pulp Main Bedroom!

The Pulp Path is the walkway from house out to garage and the driveway part where we park the cars. Existing walk was a combo mix of stone, dirt, pavement, a little grass, basically a mess, complete with dips and dives which made for some tricky walking during those inclement weather situations we tend to face here in New England. The plan being to rip all of the existing out and eventually finish off the walk with brick. We’ve settled on Boston City Hall paver bricks (very cool and like the name says, they make up the surrounding area around City Hall in Boston). Now we had ordered a bulk delivery of stone and stone dust back when we started the Pulp Patio project, with this all in mind, so basically just had to start digging and remove all of the old, getting us down a good 8 inches or so, leaving plenty of room for the stone and stone dust base. As of yesterday, all of our back up supply has been placed, the nasty tarp it was all sitting on is in the dumpster and we are about a half yard short on stone dust (mind you, we’ve changed dimensions on the path a few times so, in all, it worked out fairly well) plus we haven’t ordered the brick yet so that is something we’ll take care of shortly (all readily available).

The Pulp Main Bedroom is adjacent to the Pulp Bath Reno 2 and was, in a nutshell, the work shop for that project. We had emptied it of most furniture, put the bed on wheels, draped with protection, and brought all of our tools and materials in to have easier access to the bath room. All of this with the idea that we would eventually be giving the bedroom a makeover (and we’ve taken a few shots at it along the way as opportunities arrived). With the push on the Deck patch/paint, good time to jump back in on the bedroom for a day or two. Project in short, remove all of the old wallpaper that had been applied through the years, replace the baseboard heating with all new baseboard heating, close the remaining holes left from the electric upgrade done earlier this year, repair/upgrade the closet (we opened up a lot of it for plumbing/bathroom access), add crown molding, patch/paint entire room and strip and refinish the floors! It’s going to be great and some progress pics are below.

Last, we’ll be getting the driveway repaved soon (it too has become a bit treacherous to navigate, lots of potholes and level changes, which has us needing to remove the dumpster (they’ll be paving in that area). The dumpster was only about half full at this point, what to do? Easy, finally clean out the basement of all of the leftover pieces of scrap and construction debris that had accumulated down there throughout the homes many upgrades. We were kind of holding out on that as a lot of the pieces were original trim/flooring that sometimes comes in handy when trying to match them on current renovations, but we are now far enough along that it was time. Basement looking good!

Progress pics below, see you next week!