The poor loft… missing its floor and most of a wall for so many weeks…

First thing today, I cut the piece of floor that was a bit too wide, and then I screwed everything down nice and tight. The greatest part about that was getting my ladder back! The floor still felt a bit weak over the gap, so I added a 90 degree brace and, after dashing out to the Home Hardware, a T brace, like so:

And, so, this is what the loft looked like, with a piece of wall paneling covering it (explaining the discolouration) at about four this afternoon:

The paneling is a 3′ x 7′ sheet that costs $10. I had the wood guy cut it in two so I’d have a piece 3’x5′, roughly the size of the wall I need to cover, and a smaller piece for another project.

If this was summer time, or at least a dry winter, I would have pulled out that window and installed the paneling properly under it, but it’s not warm and dry, so I decided to just glue new paneling over what’s there. I wanted to put it in as one piece.

First thing, was to get that angled bit on the left side. I took a bunch of measurements and wound up with this:

I used a very sharp knife and a straight edge to score the paneling and then snapped it neatly. The end result was a piece that was square at one end, pointy at the other, and sized to overlap the window, like so:

Math, especially geometry, is not my strong suit, so I am most impressed that I got the angles in perfectly!

Next, I had to figure out how to get an outline for the window. Oh, glue!

Which gave me a pattern on the back of the paneling:

That worked quite well, but I could have used a bit more guidance on the bottom since I ended up with a gap between the paneling and the window. I filled it in with scraps and plastered over it; it’ll look fine once painted.

I glued the paneling in place and moved on to filling in the wall bit at the front:

And end result:

Tomorrow: sanding the wall compound and priming!!!!! Oh, and also a visit to the floor store, if open, because my new floor deserves tiles, not mismatched paint 😀