Yes, I am indeed awake, and for no good reason. This will be remedied shortly as well, either by going back to bed or getting a reason to stay awake. My preference should be clear on this.
After a shower and a few hours of shuteye, I feel a tad bit more human, other than the icky fatigue-poison gordito squish that comes with being up far too long doing things best left for professionals.
And I did mention pictures at some point.
Ah, the Grand Ballroom. It's actually a lot bigger than it looks in this pic; that back wall is just shy of 18 feet.
Here, you can barely see the lighting grid in the ceiling and the roll of photo backdrop paper that are pretty much the only remnants of the use as a studio. The floor looks damn pretty, but it's a soft wood that gets damaged too easily. Pretty sure it's red pine. You can also catch the newly-installed sheetrock on the left, which is replacing some of the old pressboard with something that has an actual "wall" feeling.
The windows in the end I rebuilt as double-glazed units. They're original, but with new glass that keeps the heat in and the sound out a bit better.
Slight angle showing part of the interior of the "closet". The brown bit is the replacement for the stuff that caved in earlier. New XPS insulation in there, only 2 inches which comes out to an R-10 instead of the R-49 that is desired now, but is better than the blown shredded newspaper that was in there so it's a net gain.
This used to be the control room where the studio equipment was set up. More water damage, and you can see the damage to the floor from the office chair-- and that was with one of those plastic floor shields. I don't have a closeup of the wood, but it's actually splintered.
Pink foam board in the window is just for insulation purposes. Single-glazed double-hung window with part of the trim cut out to fit a now long-gone air conditioner.
This used to be a "kitchen" long before I had the place; you can see the old blue color where the cabinets used to be, and looking like a weird thing jutting from the handle of the vacuum cleaner is a 220-V range outlet. The white panel against the back wall is covering up a hole that the previous owner had cut along the length of the wall so he could run "plumbing" to the "kitchen": he did it with garden hoses, which is seriously fucked up and is at least part of the cause for the bathroom not having a fully-functional bathtub faucet. He also notched the wall studs to do this bit of home improvement; happily it's not a load-bearing wall, but it backs up to the microbathroom.
At some point-- or as I suspect, several points-- there was a grease fire in the "kitchen". This used to be his mother's (or mother-in-law's) apartment, and she also smoked like a sieve. It doesn't smell like smoke anymore, mostly because the old carpet got pulled out after we first moved in.
Truly, you cannot see the glory that is this room. Other than the new wallboard visible in the first pic, the walls are this grotesque pressed-paper fiberboard that works surprisingly well as insulation for both sound and heat, and stand up to abuse about as well as a high-strength cardboard box-- you can see the water damage stains bleeding through. It definitely needs to be primed and painted, but considering where it was beforehand, this is nigh unto miracle territory.
Okay, so it's not gonna show up in Architectural Digest any time soon. Bite my shiny metal ass.