French apartment renovations, Day 628: Old moldings

Well, I thoroughly jinxed myself. After mentioning my problems with insomnia that I faced several years ago, I had a terrible night last night. I may have slept about an hour or two at best. Most of the night I was just lying there, sooooo bored and so tired but unable to sleep. Ugh. I don't have bad nights very often anymore, and it's a bit disheartening how all those old doubts and fears can come back so quickly.

I've been feeling dizzy and jittery all day as a result. But I just made myself keep going. I knew that if I sat down, I'd fall asleep and it would make it harder to sleep tonight.

My first task was to buy some 100 cm Spax screws for attaching old molding to the edge of the mezzanine. These were pieces that we had discovered when we tore down the plaster ceiling. They originally were part of the decorative wooden ceiling but had been torn down and repurposed as scrap wood to support the plaster. (What were they thinking?!?) We salvaged about 8 pieces of molding and cleaned up the three best lengths (sandblasting, denatured alcohol strip, and chemical strip, then a polyurethane finish because that's all I had on hand).

These are probably 500+ years old and hand-shaped, so each board is different even through they have the same profile. We couldn't just butt them end-to-end because they don't match up. Our solution was to make decorative spacing blocks out of extra wood from the staircase stringers. We left a gap on the right side of the mezzanine where the staircase stringer will go.



Even though they don't look perfect, I love the history that they bring to the apartment.

Then we started preparing the flooring. We'll start with a line of two planks along the mezzanine edge, with the outermost lip routed and overhanging the old molding. My dad got it all routed in the afternoon.

Eric painted most of the day. We're close to running out of dark green paint. We'll see how far we get tomorrow.

Ivy came up after dinner to see what we'd done. She had fun playing on the mezzanine and managed to lose a pencil somewhere in a crack where it will never be found again until someone demolishes everything 300 years in the future and asks, "What were they thinking?!?"

On other topics, I did lots of breech video editing today when I wasn't working in the communist apartment.