Reply To: I’ve bit the bullet, Jan. 15, 2011

[David Boeschen]

Major milestone today, I finished disassembling and moving the storage shelves that were in the original train room. This is a set of wooden shelving that I bought somewhere, three meters long (just about ten feet) that held a hundred or so kits and lots of boxes and some tools and lots of just plain crap. It’s been reassembled in the non-AC storage room off the new train room, and my wife’s plainly stated objective is to move lots of non-railroad stuff up there, so we’ll see how this goes. I still intend to build built-in shelves in the air-conditioned storage room, for the kits and other railroad stuff.

Painting of the new rooms is done, and the floors are next. Not quite ready to pull the trigger on that one, since I still need to paint in the original train room and a few other places. I had the paint electronically color-matched to a sample that I took to the paint store — not. It’s several shades darker, sort of like approaching twilight or like cloud cover, rather than a good sky blue. Still need to deal with that, since the two colors actually meet in a couple places.

Floors are going to be vinyl tile, since I can’t take the dust that accumulates on carpet nor its other problems. We pulled out the 44-year-old rotten carpet from the original train room while the contractor’s dumpster was still here, and let me tell you, that was a mess. At least no one died by falling down the stairs trying to tug on wadded-up chunks of rotten carpet that got stuck in the stair rail. I still have a bajillion staples in the floor, and rotten padding chunks trapped under the staples, but the floor guy assured me that the existing 44-year-old plywood wasn’t good enough to lay tile on so he was just going to cover it with new plywood. Thank goodness I’d finished ripping out the baseboards myself. Curiously, some non-railroad owner of this house had painted the room bright blue to go with the red carpet, maybe during the time when there was a pool table in the room.

Because there are some filthy monsters of the feline variety that occasionally sneak into the train room, the carpet was even more a bad idea than just being a dust catcher. I’m sure you catch my drift.

The floor guy was totally ok with my idea of jacking up some of the legs of the layout and slipping tile under them. He was also totally ok with moving the workbench around to stay out of the way of the tile layers. This is a workbench I built from an article in MR in 1975-76 and weighs a couple hundred pounds, not counting the railroad crap in it. We’ll see. I also want to see if he can slip plywood under some of self-same legs. Wonder if he thought of that.

Ron Merrick