Work Work Work

After spending a day traveling to the towns where our work site and hotel site were, the next few days were hard work. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday morning we would arrive at the job site at 8 am and leave at 5 pm, except leaving after lunch for Paris on Thursday. I'm not going to go into a lot of detail about what the pictures are showing, but our team worked on tearing down wallpaper, tearing down walls, painting, putting up textured wallpaper, electrical wiring, mudding and patching, and building a stage.

I was on the team that worked in the hall and stairwell taking down wallpaper.

The walls up the stairs to the second floor were quite high. In order to reach the wallpaper, the guys had to make a homemade scaffold. At the top of the stairs on the 2nd floor landing was put a step stool. Then a very high ladder was put on about the fourth step from the bottom. Across these two ladders were put some boards so the men could stand on them in order to be able to spray the wallpaper with water and scrape it off. The following pics do a better job of showing you what I am trying to explain. I stood by the bottom of the tall ladder and kept an eye on those boards to make sure they didn't start to shift and slip through the rungs.

 

On another day, some of the guys put up a textured wallpaper onto these same walls. Once this paper was put up, it would be painted. I guess this is pretty common in Europe.

 Two and a half of my days were nothing but painting the basement. There were 4 large rooms that had to be primed on the walls and ceilings and then painted. These walls were all holey, porous cement--not smooth drywall. But, before painting could begin, some electrical wiring and mudding and patching had to be done.

A few walls upstairs were torn down and some new ones built to expand the sanctuary on the main floor. This is where Roger spent most of his time. There are no wooden stud frames built for walls. They glue large, heavy gypsum blocks onto each other just like you would bricks.

You can see in this pic where a wall was knocked down and all of the space behind it was a separate room. That space would be turned into a stage which you will see in upcoming pics. This lengthened the sanctuary.

Hauling out all of the rubble.

 Another wall knocked down. A new one was built a few feet back adding width to the sanctuary.

 

 

 

Another wall knocked down that would be rebuilt a few feet back to widen the sanctuary. You can see how it came up to this pillar and in the next pic, it has been knocked down showing the space between the pillar and a bathroom wall.

Any rubble/trash we had would be piled up in this area on the sidewalk in front of the church. I wish I'd gotten a pic of the mountain of rubble that grew here.

New walls.

Building and wiring the stage.

A before, middle, and after shot of the sanctuary.

On our half day of Thursday, since the dungeon painting was done, we Cinderellas set about cleaning up wherever we could.

Here is our awesome team.