Looking forward to your update. The LR looks great.
Bret
Thanks
Bret! We love the new LR and DR. The new LR furniture is amazing. Super comfortable and makes the space feel so much lighter and open even though we gained spots for 2-3 more people.
A good patch job on the cracks, and the paint. The wainscotting paint job looks great. I like the wood floors. We just installed click-flooring on top of a narrow-strip oak floor original to a home in Miami, CBS construction, par for the course here, probably dating from after WW II to early 1950's. It was my wife's parents' home, and has been in the family close-to 50 years. The GC we had for renovation told us, "since it's going to be a rental, don't re-do the oak floors. Use the click-flooring and cover-up the original oak floors. If you decide to move in here (very unlikely) or sell, the oak floors underneath are a good selling-point." We gutted the bath and also the kitchen. All-done, the whole interior re-done as-necessary/painted. It got new switches and duplex outlets, some wiring repair, although in the last 10 years it got a new main meter can/disconnect, and branch service panel. The central AC was also replaced during that time.
You'll be happy with the Delkevic exhaust, I have their system for a VMax, it's stout material, and it fits like OEM. A good chrome finish too.
For your bikes, look-into the Race Tech cartridge emulators, they change the forks for the better, big-time. RICOR also makes them.
If you read the Oct/Nov Cafe Racer magazine, they have an article on a guy in Pittsburgh who rebuilds the inexpensive RFY shocks, from new. The RFY have a remote reservoir, and are N-gas charged, but evidently they can stand to benefit from a better assembly. Chris Livengood does this, and Cafe Racer got a set of shocks from him for a duration test. You might want to check on his services/work, it could be a moderate-cost upgrade if the stock shocks are toast. chrislivengood.net CL MotoTech This is the second article I've seen on this fellow's service. I think if someone believed it wasn't worth it, they would mention it. I have no experience myself with his products.
Thanks
driftpin! Repairing the cracks was a PITA job that just needed to be done, but I'm glad I went ahead and did it now. The darker color in the DR under the chair rail looks like a suede in person. We hadn't planned on it, but that's just how that color turned out and I love it. We tried at least 6 colors under the sand color and none of them worked.
Our wood floors are the original varnished oak from 1939. We considered refinishing them years ago, but none of the modern finishes had the same look as the old varnish. we also like the wear on the floor, but a few areas get stained really easily now so it takes several "moppings" with Murphy's Oil Soap to get those areas clean. When we had our house on the market several years ago, a Millennial couple wanted us to refinish the floors as part of their offer.
I was more surprised our agent even bothered to bring us that one. I told them to pound sand. They could refinish the floors before they moved in if they wanted too, but the floors are original and unmolested. I wasn't going to be the one that "ruined" them, especially if their financing fell through. Then we'd be stuck with floors we didn't want.
I was stoked to get the Delkelvic exhaust on sale. It's still in the box, I haven't had a chance to get the garage cleared out to bring the KZ650 in. And I plan to use the Race Tech GCEs on all my bikes. I have a standard fork from a 2002 R6 that I'm waffling on using on the KZ restomod with a CognitoMoto spoke wheel conversion hub. If I go that route I will add the GCEs to that fork too. I'll definitely check out his shocks. All of my bikes need new shocks. The KZ650 is a bucket list bike for me, so eventually it will get custom Race Tech shocks to match the fork upgrade, but those sound like a great option to get the bike on the road for less cost initially. I can probably swap the RFY shocks over to the KZ440 bike later too.
So, I'm going to post my past week's shenanigans in a few posts. There's just that many pics.
A week ago Friday my daughter turned 21 and my wife and her girl friends turned it into a girls weekend. They took my daughter out on her birthday up at Purdue, then they all headed to Indy for the rest of the weekend. My son spent the night at one of his best friend's houses that Friday night so I had the house to myself. My hobby/storage area in the basement was a disaster. It was unusable and I could barely walk back there. Last Friday night was the perfect opportunity to pull everything out and start putting stuff back where it belonged while also sorting through stuff to purge.
In that process I discovered that the basement wall sealer I had spent SO MUCH time on was failing. I put it on two sections of the outer walls in Dec. 2016 or Spring of 2017. I thought I had posted pics early in my thread, but I didn't and I don't have the pics handy to share here now. Anyway, or basement walls are block with a semi-smoothed skim coat of plaster over them. I spent days prepping the walls when I applied the sealer so I had a good, thick layer on it. It looked great, but over the 18 months to 2 years, the plaster has let go from the block in a lot of spots so the sealer cracked and was chipping off in big chunks. The plaster underneath turned to a strange dust. It looked like **** and dust or chips of sealer was getting all over my totes and other stuff on the storage shelves. I decided to start scraping off the walls. I didn't get very far Friday night. I wasn't in the right mindset to tackle it Friday night.
I shifted to a different project which was getting all the debris out of the crawl space area under the kitchen. The previous owner's knocked a huge hole in the block/brick wall and dug out the ground where they knocked the hole in the wall. It makes it much easier to get in the crawl space under the kitchen, but looks like **** and I have no easy way of blocking off the opening so it get's chilly in my area in the winter. As I was cleaning it out, I had to mist the area to keep the dust knocked down. While slowly filling a 5gal bucket to haul the loose dirt and debris out, I thought about how I wanted to use the excavated space and seal it off from the rest of the crawl space. It took me six trips with the bucket to haul the dirt and debris out to the trash. And I filled my 20gal basement garbage can with the big chucks of debris.
BEFORE:
AFTER:
I finished that little project around 1am local time so I went back to scraping the walls.
Saturday morning I finished scraping the one wall that is roughly 12' long. I have three sections of heavy duty shelving on that wall. In order to scrape the wall, each section had to be completely cleared out so I had full access to the wall and floor. I used a broom and dust pan to scoop up most of the **** I scraped off, then I used the vacuum to get the rest of it and clean the floor.
This is the last section I finished on Saturday:
And the amount of sealer and plaster that ends up on the floor for each section:
I decided the ~9 linear feet on the other wall can wait for a little while until I get a few other projects done.
The remainder of Saturday was spent sorting, purging, and putting things away correctly. I found so much stuff I forgot I had bought or had been looking for for some time. By the end of Saturday night/early Sunday morning (pre-sunrise, it was
EARLY) I had most of the stuff back on the shelves and I could walk into the area again.
My little work table and storage shelf in the area was still a disaster so that was the next area that I tackled.
This is after I had put away everything on the work table that had a home or could be put with other similar things in my storage totes:
I got everything off the table and removed the wire shelf, which only served to collect **** via FSS and store my fishing rods.
My pegboard never really worked for me. i liked the way it worked, but other than scissors and shipping tape, nothing else stored up there was routinely used. It just added clutter. So off came the pegboard:
After the pegboard was off there were a lot of holes in the wall that needed to be filled in. The rest of Sunday was spent getting the wall filled and patched.
TBC...
My neighbor is an appraiser so those numbers are solid. A 3/4 bath on the main floor? That adds $6K-$8K over a half bath because it's considered a full bath even if it's only a shower. We're planning to add the shower this summer, then remodel the upstairs bathroom after that. 
