After two weeks of progress we went into limbo for a week.  The countdown ran out and we are still not moved in.  For some reason our GC likes to do a flurry of work with ten guys working and then follow it by sending one guy a day to the house.

We, on the other hand, have been hard at work stripping off the paint from the marble fireplace in the small bedroom- feel free to ooh and ahh at the before and after photos.

Ignore the centerpiece, it was painted with a gold super-paint and has been hard to get off, I am still working on it.  We do intend to rip that inner piece out but want to wait until after the inspection because we can’t just have a gaping hole and we don’t know what is behind there.  This fireplace had no summer doors like our others.

I tried a product called Peel Away.  It is environmentally friendly like Lead Out but has no strong odor.  It is not for lead paint since there was only a couple of coatings on it and we figured it was probably not lead-based.  It worked fairly well considering it sat in the house all winter with no heat.  It took me three rounds to get it this clean.

What would the holiday weekend be without out a problem, right?

While were at the house we turned on the split ac system for the first time to test it out.  It was cool and quiet.  Heaven on a 90+ day.  Since our crappy rental apartment has only one small air conditioner that we found in the street (yeah we’re garbage pickers) the luxury was taunting us.  For about a minute, then my husband discovered it was leaking in the basement.  So we tried the one in the other bedroom.  Leaking too.  We could only assume that the ones on the parlor floor leaked as well.  The contractor had just sanded and primed all the walls!  The thought of cutting through the walls to get access to the pipes was more than we could bear.  Of course, this was the 4th so the company was not open.  To give them credit though they were there on Friday, showed up promptly at our house. and fixed the problem.  Apparently, the brass fittings that were installed did not work properly and they had to replace them with stainless steel ones.  Hopefully the problem is solved.