New Doorway!

Back in March, before the earthquake here, I started cutting in a doorway between the two shop houses we have. That way we can walk from one into the other without going outside and entering through the front door.

These shop houses are three story concrete buildings with the first floor built to have a retail shop or restaurant. The second floor could be used for the shop or as living area. The third floor is to live in.

We originally bought the double shop house on the East side of the complete building. Then Daeng talked with the

owner of the center single unit and bought it. We then re-piped the drain lines of both units as they had a water problem and that is why we could buy them at such a good price.

You can read about those stories by CLICKING HERE and CLICKING HERE.

Daeng's nephue started to help me at the beginning but like most young folks he got bored and drifted off to

doing something more fun.

At the start we talked about how dirty this project would be as we where going to use a rotor-hammer to drill many holes in the masonry wall. then we would use a 4" hand grinder with a diamond blade and cut both side of the wall. After that we would break out the the wall that was made with small red bricks laid in mortar.

We marked the wall and put up a plastic sheeting tenting around the area we were

going to cut out. It was very dusty and I could only work for about five minutes at a time when I was doing the cutting. It was during this period of time that Kit, Daeng's nephue, got bored and wondered off to do other things. I did all the cutting as I felt it was too dangerous for him.

After that Daeng helped me break out the wall and put all the brick and cement in bags to haul away. It did look good and made a great walk though. It was a bigger job than I originally figured but that is usually the case.

We spend a few days talking about putting in a set

of wooden door jams or just rendering the opening with plaster and painting it. When we talked with Mi he said he could render it with cement and if we were not happy with that we could put in the door jams.

Well, he did a great job with the opening and we are very happy with the way it looks.

You can now go anyplace in this building with 7 bedrooms, 5 bathrooms, 2 kitchens with outside cooking area, TV room, storage room, eating area and both shop areas without going outside.

We think we will use the smaller shop area as our garage.

We will use the area in

the picture behind Mi as a little eating area as it is off the 2nd floor kitchen area and our master bedroom suite.

I also made a wood threshold, put three coats of marine varnish on it and set it motor.

It looks pretty good for a plumber. LOL