French renovations Day 74: Finally we build, rather than destroy!

6,473 steps

74 days into our renovations and finally we did something other than break things. I'm really tired tonight so I'll post the video tomorrow.

I've been waking up early in the mornings thinking of how to engineer our mezzanine structure. One of the ledger boards passes over two doorways, a few centimeters below the top, which gives us fewer surfaces to attach to. Ideally we want a really solid anchor every 40 cm.

We came up with a good solution today: cut a notch in the top of both doorways and insert a header piece, which becomes load-bearing since it rests of top of the vertical parts of the door frame.

We installed these headers in both door frames right at the new mezzanine height. We had to trim the entry door a few centimeters--no big deal, we're getting rid of it anyway since it's a cheap hollow-core door.

We used our wall chaser (rainureuse) for the first time and it's great! It creates enormous clouds of dust even with a vacuum attached but that's to be expected. It was super easy to chisel out the channels with the Bosch hammer.

With both door frames now reinforced and the channels cut, we could FINALLY put up the ledger board! Right now it's tacked into place with two wood screws. Tomorrow we'll come back and anchor it in with lag screws (where it attaches to wood) and 10 mm threaded rods & epoxy (where it attaches into the solid walls).

At this point Eric left to feed the kids lunch--it was well past 1 pm--and I stayed to smash the wall dividing the hallway. It's now a pile of rubble that is halfway cleaned up.

I bumped my pinkie finger while demolishing and now it's looking a bit zombie-ish too. I tried piercing it with a heated paperclip twice and a heated needle once and couldn't get through the nail. Then I gave up. I guess I'm not good at self-inflicted pain. There's only a small purple spot and a medium-sized pale red spot.

I finally came up for my first meal of the day at 2:45 pm. The kids were going stir-crazy so Eric took Inga and Ivy out until curfew. Zari and Dio worked on homework (in theory, not necessarily in reality).

I made spanakopita for dinner and nothing else. That's all I had time for! But no complaints.