I tiled the shower surround:
Then painted the bathroom walls their final grey color.
I hit a hiccup with the electrical wiring behind the bathroom sink outlet, so I had to call my neighbor's company to figure it out and they installed the bathroom light/fan and GFI outlets while they were here. It sucks to pay that kind of money when you could do it yourself, but I learned how to do it for next time, so it was worth it for a lesson.
I mean even they were stumped at why there were two separate wires just capped in the box (left and right pictured), but they showed me how to make sure that it's safe so that it can still get to functioning properly. Apparently it was originally wired with two line in multiple places where one line could have worked and then they only used one wire from each of the two lines so there were multiple unnecessary wires around. Really strange.
I never really took pictures of the finished paint on the walls in the other rooms or the kitchen cabinets, but that happened and now I've been focusing on the wood floors. They're original hand cut pine that I'm going to paint to protect them from wear and tear since pine is a softer wood. I started by threading in some new boards that I stole from the 4th floor in order to fix where they had previously done a bad job of patching it. The nice thing is that I'm painting it, it didn't have to be perfect. After threading them back in, I used TSP to clean all the floors really well. There was a LOT of dirt caked onto those boards and I probably could have washed them multiple times with my water still turning black after one dunk. The boards from the 4th floor that I threaded in were especially dirty with what looks to be coal soot on them.
In this picture you can see me starting to clean with TSP (with the threaded in boards in black to the left side).
The parts of the floor that had been painted previously, like here with this brown-orange color and other places in a blueish-grey, cleaned up much easier than the straight wood grain, which tended to splinter and fray since it had never been finished or sanded well.
After initially scrubbing on my hands and knees in a small section, the roofer's brush on the end of a painter's pole that my dad got worked much better for the scrubbing and then we mopped it up. The mop got caught in he splinters a lot. We realized after a short time that there was so much dirt that it made sense to just mop it with water before using the TSP for a final scrub and rinse. Between my dad using the water and me on the TSP we knocked it out in a night, but we felt it long after. Here are a few pictures from after we cleaned while it was still wet.
After letting it dry, I caulked the cracks with a couple different products. I used wood glue to glue in some scrap pieced while threading in the boards. I used Durham's rock hard putty for the larger cracks that were wider. It's nice that you can get it to the consistency that you want by the amount of water you mix in, but man it sets up fast so don't make too much at once. I made it like play-dough for the larger cracks and it gave me something to build off of. I used fast-dry white acrylic painter's caulk to fill most of the cracks that might have leaked paint. Make sure it's the paint-able type and smooth it as much as you can with your finger to make any excess relatively smooth. Here are a couple pictures of the floor after caulking.
Basically I just wanted to plug up the cracks as much as I could so that the paint would stay on top of the wood instead of dripping through. After the caulking, I used a belt sander on the worst places to even it out closer the rest of the floor. This was mostly at the edges of where I had threaded in the new boards, and while I didn't get them perfect I made the transition less severe. I then used the same small orbital sander that I used on the drywall with the same 180 (or 150?) grit pads to quickly give a once over to where I had caulked and to the top of the boards so that the paint has something to bite onto and create a good bond. It went quickly and it gave me a last close up to use the nail punch on what remained in the floor and the flexibility to get in the groove without getting rid of the grain texture. On a few boards that were splintering a little more I could also take out the loose splinters to make sure I'd only be painting solid wood.
Today I'm going to vacuum really well and Sunday I'll put on the first light coat of oil-based floor paint. I figured out that I can get into the apartment through the fire escape so that I'll be able to work in the kitchen and bathroom while the paint is drying and that will give me the ability to get a lot more done next week.
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