Restoration Of Our Front Façade Progressing

Our place is shrouded with black netting that covers the scaffolding they’re using to work on the front façade. As a result it’s hard to see their progress, but they’re finally down to the parlor level on one side, so you can see their restoration work as you go in the building…

There are these rosettes on each side of the windows… Here’s one on the top floor that’s still in great condition…

Rosette in brownstone façadeThe mason has taken a mould of one of the good ones and is using the mould to restore the ones that aren’t in good shape… Here’s one around the parlor window that’s in progress…

Restoring rosette in brownstone façadeThere’s also a detail over the front of the big parlor window that was missing on our place and is missing on many of our sister townhouses, but is still there on one of them – it’s a subtle crown moulding-like detail in a corner just above the window. The foreman noticed the detail on the neighboring house and is having the mason reinstate it on our place. They seem to be having fun with the restoration… Which is good…

Here you see them working on the sill for the parlor window…

Restoring parlor window sillAnd below you see they’re restoring a detail around the door and creating a template of it to recreate the same detail on the other side of the door where it’s completely deteriorated…

Front door detail restorationWith all the netting up it’s been hard to see the progress. It will be cool when they take down the netting – we’ll finally get to see a fresh “new” façade.

Dan’s also been fussing over getting the color of the façade just right. He got a piece of the original brownstone and had it color matched. But that’s tricky ’cause the original brownstone had something like mica in it that made it sparkle slightly. We’re wondering whether we can get a mica aggregate in the paint we use, but we don’t want to overdo it and make it look like its got bling embedded in it…

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