M1 and R1 are very prompt at 8:00 a.m. No holdover holiday traffic, I guess. I'd been dithering post-shower about face creams so have to run put on my dress so I can go open up. M1 had hoped there would be less mortar, etc., on the floor, but is not surprised. The tile has been promised to be ready for pickup tomorrow. Meanwhile, there seems to be plenty to do. OO is coming for a trip to the paint store to try again on the color matching.
ACK!!! The plastic isn't properly sealed over the kitchen door (my fault) and there's dust everywhere. They're griding the remains of the mortar and bits of the concrete to make it flat and I have more dust than even on the worst day of jackhammering. On the other hand, it's heavier dust that settles quickly, so even though everything is unexpectedly dirty, I'm not breathing that much of it.
So. The floor may be flat, but it's not level. By the better part of an inch. OO comes to talk to M1 and R1. They discuss how high the floor should be to make the counter the right height, including that M1 wants the countertop to have 1x6's under it rather than plywood. They talk about solutions. Because the wood in the LR/DR was retrofitted, it's always been higher than the kitchen/entry with levelers of about 1.5 inches. The one in the wide opening from the living room into the entry is pretty obvious, but people who don't know this house can trip in the dining room to kitchen doorway. The best solution is to pour a self-levelling layer of concrete. This will raise the floor by the dining room door so that the leveller has a much smaller slope, though it will also make a step up into the kitchen from the entry. This might be an issue with the groceries, but there isn't enough room to do a slope without popping up the edges of the tiles. So it's good and bad. The best part is that the appliances will be level.
I go with OO to the paint store. M1 calls to give me the estimate. The pros actually have a hole in their schedule tomorrow, an unforseen piece of luck. Their price is about the same as M1's would be just for materials if he were to do the job himself, so I agree that the thing to do is hire them. OO decides to go to the other branch of the paint store to try a different set of eyes on the color match. I've looked up the original formulae. The dining room was an off the chip color, and I decide that getting that would be better than trying to match the current (7 years of mild fading) color, so that's easy. I also decide to get the wall color for the stairs in the same formula as the trim (if they can get that right), just in matte, and have both sides painted. They were originally both done as a match to a hand mixed sample, but it was the same sample. I also told the man doing the matching the originally formula. He says it doesn't matter, but I hand him the paint chip of the Pratt & Lambert Maya that was mixed into the Benjamin Moore Superwhite (10:1) to come up with the color. I figure it can't hurt! Even though we're trying to match the current color, rather than the original.
When I get home, E asks me if I want to get an airing by going with her on an errand. Yes! Get out of the dust. And dinner out with another friend. Multiple dustings of the floor only go so far, but all the out time has helped the air. It's just such a shame all of L's hard work yesterday when up in a cloud of dust.
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