A Facelift for a Building

By

The new job completed



Across the street from our apartment, we have witnessed the restoration of a building during the last several months. It's been interesting to see the process used in renewing the exterior plaster on it. 




The picture below shows what a deteriorated exterior looks like. This picture was taken out of our back window of the courtyard surrounding our house. It's in very bad shape because of the age. Street-side walls don't look this bad, but it shows how the plaster chips away in old age. I'm sure that during Soviet times most exterior walls resembled this picture. 
Peeling plaster off walls


Scaffolding being assembled










Teamwork
We knew that the building across from us was going to be repaired when we heard the noise of the scaffolding being erected around it. We were amazed how fast the men threw that scaffolding together - three or four tiers tall. They handed up piece after piece from one tier to the next as if they were handling pencils. 



Stripping off old plaster



The next step was removing the old plaster with a power washer or something like that. It took days for the men to spray off the old paint and plaster to get it ready to apply new plaster. Some days, they had to resort to scraping off the old, especially around the windows. 






Time to paint



Finally, the day came to apply the new coat of paint to put the finishing touch on the surface. It took more than two weeks for them to paint and do detail work around the building again. We were very happy then the scaffolding came down showing that they were completed with the task. It was fascinating to see the project up close, however. 


I'm sure the restaurant owner on the lowest floor agreed with us also, so he could open his business again. Next week's post will talk about the restaurant. 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

WHAT WAS THAT NAME AGAIN?

By
Image
This week brings a big change for us. We are moving from our temporary apartment to our permanent flat across the city. That means packing everything we brought plus the extra food, etc we've accumulated since we arrived. At least, we don't have to get it into the six suitcases this time. But however many boxes and bags, we need to move this all ourselves by Friday morning.

We are moving from a street called U Libenskeho pivovaru. When we first saw that name our first reaction was WHAT? How do you begin a name with the letter U all by itself. And why is the name so long?

After we were here for a couple weeks, we found out that the letter U by itself is a preposition meaning "on, at, near". The area of Prague that we live in now is called Liben. Finally, we learned that the all important word beer is "pivo". So the name of our current street means "Near a brewery in Liben".

We are moving into an apartment on Bubenecska. Bubenecska is located in the …
Read more

DOING LAUNDRY IS ALWAYS THE SAME - OR IS IT

By
Image
Thankfully, we have a washing machine in our apartment. I was thrilled to hear that. I must say that it's quite tiny, though. It sits below the cabinet in our bathroom as you can see in the picture.

Because of it's size, I need to do laundry almost every day. One load consisted of our two bath towels. It seems ridiculous, but the washer was full with just the two towels.
The first time I tried to wash a load, I couldn't figure out how it worked. I mean how hard can it be to use a wash machine. I've been using them for more than 40 years.

On the day we moved in, the landlord tried to explain it to me in his clipped English, but I just waived him off and said I'd figure it out. When it came right down to doing it, however, it was a different matter.

The dial looked much more complicated than I'd ever seen. The strange thing to me was that the red numbers in the display window had 137 in it. I wasn't sure what that meant - temperature of the water? speed of t…
Read more

Higher is Better

By
Image
After one week of living in St. Petersburg, we were able to move into our new apartment which is in a twenty-one floor high rise building. Thankfully, we live on the third floor so we don't have to wait forever for the elevator to get to our floor. We love it here because it's very new, bright, and close to the metro that my husband will use to go to teach this fall.


 The apartment is very spacious - by European standards - with a living room, bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, and WC.


It was furnished with a couch, bed, table, chairs, and even a big screen TV. That saved us LOTS of money!

We have a view of a river out of our bedroom window - maybe not a great view, but at least it's not another high rise staring at us. There is construction on both sides of the water, but that's OK for us.


We think we're almost the first people to live here because it so nice and new. We are thrilled with that. The water is always hot in the shower, not waiting for the hot water heater to …
Read more