Laying The Foundations for Our New Shop and RBVA's future

After months of working with builders to design a shop and city officials to get our brand new shop permitted, last week, we finally began grading the site on P Street and our building gets delivered this week. It's an exciting time in RBVa!

Pryor Hauling is doing all of the site work for us (and good job of it too).

2015 is shaping up to be quite the year for RBVA.

Finishing Up Round Monument Avenue Porch

For the past couple of months, we have been posting pictures of our progress in building a rounded porch on Monument Avenue in the historic Museum District. We have completed the balcony on the second story of the porch. It required a lot of measuring to get the curvature of the railing just right.

Construction is completed... all that remains is to paint! We just need to wait for it to warm up a bit....

Thank you to our crew for doing such a great job. Credit for the main design goes to Joseph F Yates, Architect. One of the best in the biz.

Replacing Stile and 2 Panels on a door from the White House of the Confederacy.

The door on the east deck of the White House is not protected by a porch roof. It has taken on some moisture, most notably in the lower section of the door.  We began by removing the rotted stile and panels to make new ones. Van Jester Woodworks fabricated the panels out of heart pine. 

Voila!

The door is primed and ready for paint and re installation.

White House of The Confederacy Porch Restoration: Meanwhile.. back in the shop....

If you go by the White House of The Confederacy you may notice something.. a lot of the porch is missing! That's because we took them back to the shop and are working on them there. (Note: This is not wood original to the structure, rather wood used to repair the porch in either in the 1980s or 90s)

Jerrett is cleaning the oil and grease build up off some of the boards. They were milled out of joists from a factory, so any boards that were cut from the outside edge have one original (and dirty) plane.

The lumber is sorted by usable length/quality

 

Before epoxy work to reuse them...

After epoxy... 

Floorboards stacked, clean, and ready for priming! 

On the right, primed boards. Jerrett works on more epoxy on the center stack.