Welcome to Episode four of the restoration of our new building. The building is really coming along and starting to give us hope that it will be done in my lifetime! But the one thing that had me floored, was the floorsโฆ From across the street, they looked like great old wooden floors. Upon closer inspection, they were very crooked, none of the thresholds matched and there was no subfloor making them move and creek as you walked on them. This is about when I brought in my contractor consultant and all-around wizard of all things construction Keith Dobbs. We had a long talk about some structural challenges with the building in the attic and under the floors. We concluded that he would do a bunch of reinforcing under the building. Now it was up to me to get the floors level and to get them to match room to room. This was a huge undertaking cutting about 100 stringers everyone a different thickness to get all of the rooms straight. After that, the entire building was covered with new underlayment. This took almost a month to complete and boy do my knees hate me now but now we have wonderful solid, flat floors. One of the last big expenses was windows. We decided to have Keith replace most of the windows and the front and rear doors because they were too far gone to save. The 2 large 100-year-old windows in the front of the house were salvaged and are the originals with the wavy glass. Now we were making progress and feeling really good about this old building. I started finishing the drywall and started painting and installed the new cabinets we got at the auction. We installed over 1000 feet of computer network cable throughout the entire building to run all of the technology. At this point we figured it was safe to pick out the flooring, hardware, and wallpaper. The plan from day one was to have workstations in all of the offices rather than desks giving us more room to work comfortably. This took a little engineering especially the one in the Digital Art and Multimedia Journalists offices. Now it was time to finish the trim work and painting. We shut down for a few days and everyone helped paint the entire building. Turns out Maitland is our detail girl and worked to paint all of the straight lines and fix our messes. I think it was in the first week we owned the building Ivan did some Photoshop work of what the final painted building would look like. We gave this to Rangel Painting to show them what we wanted it to look like. It was my wife Lisaโs idea to paint the doors red. The Rangle crew were wonderful to work with and went over the top to get our new building looking like new. In the next and final episode, I will give you a complete tour of what became of this wonderful old building and what our plans are going forward. Stay tuned! See all the episodes at AllAboutHennessey.com
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