French apartment renovations, Day 151: Nearing the (ceiling) finish line

20,116 steps

Not a bad exercise day, between going running in the morning, running errands the rest of the morning, and jack hammering in the afternoon.

I helped Ivy make some sea glass art for a friend's birthday party tomorrow. I did more of the designing than normal and, of course, all of the glueing since it's an epoxy and not easy to work with.

Zari didn't have any afternoon classes so she read books and exercised via PE With Joe. She deserves it after the last several stressful weeks of preparing for her brevet blanc.

We were planning on having a dinner picnic at the beach with several friends, but the weather turned chilly, cloudy, and windy by late afternoon. We all decided to cancel as we would have been shivering and trying to keep our food from blowing away.

Renovation update: We went back to the first half of the ceiling that we had removed a few months ago. There were lots of places where the old cement hadn't gotten removed to the level of the wooden cross-beams. (I'm not sure what it's made of, but it certainly isn't plaster. It looks and feels a lot more like concrete or cement. It's really hard, and it's the same material that the terrazo floor upstairs was laid into--it serves as a tile bed, a solid fill between each ceiling beam, and the ceiling plaster underneath. Weird.)

We're going to attach the new drywall directly to the wood, so we needed to take off every bit of plaster sticking out. What did that mean? Lots more jackhammering! Eric wanted to put it off until we were ready to hang drywall, but I said, "Let's just do it now and get it DONE." So now it is done, except for two small areas.

We also cut a few more channels for electricity. We're now ready to run wires for all of the ceiling lights on the upper ceiling.

We have a good 30 bags of debris to dipose of even after many trips. The plumber is coming on Monday so our weekend goal is to get everything cleaned up and vacuumed so it's not such a dusty mess everywhere.

Now that curfew has been moved to 9 pm, Eric and I were able to go on our evening walk! We put Zari and Dio in charge of getting Ivy and Inga to bed. What a luxury to come home without the circus that is bedtime.