Status Report, 14 March 2021

Goals from week of Mar 8

• Close out as much as possible on the Pearl St. list
• Source roof repair for Mintwood.

Accomplishments

• Identified ~5 roofing companies. Arranging bids.
• This week I spent most of my mornings working as the GC on Mintwood (chasing bids, meeting with subcontractors, etc.), and then the afternoons working as labor on Pearl St. I suspect this pattern will continue for a while.

Corp Update

• Mom continues to work on the books. Our goal is to get a tight set of financials that would be easy to put in front of a commercial lender at any point. It also helps in the process of preparing my tax returns. (Entropy is run as a pass -through entity, so the revenue/ losses go directly to our tax return.
• I’m heading to CA on Tuesday for a week with my wife. I’ll be spending time getting the house there ready to rent out, as well as packing things up to bring to Pgh. We’re planning that Kathryn will join me in Pgh some time in April.

Mintwood St

• With the bulk fo the work shifting to Mintwood, I’ve lifted it higher in the status report.
  
• Demolition:  Work continues. They’ve stripped all of the 3rd floor, and nearly all of the second floor. The piles of debris comes and goes. At times it can reach 8-9′ tall in the kitchen. We’re going to go through an entire 40 yd dumpster, as today alone we dumped 19,000 lbs. of plaster. My demo guy has someone that takes plaster in a “clean fill”, so fortunately we don’t have to pay for that. Still, we’ll exceed budget by about $500 or so on demolition.
• Roofing. Once we peeled the plaster off the third floor, I noticed a number of pinholes in the slate mansard. More troubling was the ~1″ gap by the parapet wall we rebuilt last summer. The mason didn’t flash it to the roof, thinking the roofer would do it. The roofer, in turn didn’t touch it because he said the parapet was “cosmetic”. Obviously the flashing isn’t cosmetic and it needs to be fixed. I’ve had some challenges getting roofers who work on slate. I suspect I’m going to end up going with a replacement product (imitation slate, made either from stone dust on steel, or compressed stone/rubber/ resin.). Had two different companies out to look at it so far. Waiting to get the actual bids, and trying to arrange for the others to come out and look at it.
• Carpenters did a walk through this week. Just going room by room with the plans in hand, making sure we’re on the same page about their scope. They are very detailed, which is good. I have another walk through with them tomorrow so they can get a second look. They have agreed to use my apprentice (Mike) during their work, which will help manage costs a bit.
• Insulation Need to source insulation, as we will be insulating a lot of the exterior walls and all of the roof.  Likely to be spray foam in the roof, and batts along the walls. Probably start sourcing after I’ve sorted out the roofing repair.
• HVAC contract has been signed.  They won’t be able to start until most of the framing is done on the interior.  Likely ~second half of April.
• Plumbers:  Signed with Matt Mertz plumbing.  They started high, but came in line once I told them what I was willing to pay. 
• Plaster:  (no change) I have a fallback, but will be looking for better options. 

Next Steps

• Continue demolition.
• Source a roofing repair person

Pearl St.

• Plugging away at the “to do” list on Trello. I keep track of all the open items on Trello because it’s easier for me to keep notes on the various things that are going on. I also use it to help my various crews know what they could do next 🙂
• I built a new door for the basement, which is no small feat when 3 sides of the door are not plumb/ level. It’s done now, and a bit of paint/ caulk will make it look like it’s always supposed to be this way. I enjoy projects like that because I leverage my woodworking to work on the house.
• The last missing window was installed on Monday, March 8th. Great to have the building be completely airtight.
• I also added a ton of insulation to the attic. There are some crawl spaces behind the knee walls. I put R38 on the “floor” of the crawl space, and put R21 in the knee walls. I did some infrared pictures before and after and it definitely makes a difference.
• Countertops are still in fabrication.  They called today and asked about shifting to the afternoon (still March 23) for installation, but I have an appointment at Mintwood that afternoon, so I didn’t change it.
• My focus now is to get the kitchen as dialed in as possible. I’m pre-installing all of the dishwasher lines before the countertops go in, and generally trying to do all the work I can before I leave for California. I won’t be back until the night before the install, so it all has to be buttoned up.

Next Steps
This week:  

• Kitchen trello items.

Goals for week of Mar 15

• Prep Pearl St. kitchen for countertop installation
• Continue to work on roof repair for Mintwood via phone calls.