It’s been 25 days since we began this journey of tearing down an antique booth facade and replacing it with my grand plans. You can read all about my grand plans HERE.

Lest you forgot this is where we started.

And where we left you. You can read Part 1 HERE.

Demo took one day. What follows has taken us many, many days.

I cannot stress enough how amazing Big Daddy was in his preparation. In addition to his amazing sketches, he calculated how much timber we would need for the framing. I still have no idea what that number was. I can tell you that the first few days I felt like all we did was move lumber from here to there.

And while we started off great, to our surprise our little pancake (that small air compressor in the back left corner) said, “uh, no thanks” to working properly. Big Daddy called me in a panic. You see, to nail really long nails into 2×4’s for hours and hours was not an option.  Not only had we already rented a framing nailer from Home Depot, Big Daddy has some depth perception issues that make nailing anything a little well, how do you say impossible.

Thankfully, the amazing women (and owners) allowed us to use theirs. Whew, crisis averted.

As you might recall, we planned to take the entire 16 ft. span of the booth and bump it out another 3 ft. And after a couple of days we had this.

You can start to see our bay windows on the left and right of the ladder. I’m pretty sure this picture was taken about 3am. Did I mention we have pulled some all nighters?

Now that the framing out front was under control, Big Daddy went to work on extending the original 8 ft. high facade into a grand 10 feet tall.

Big Daddy is a perfectionist. Most of the time I feel like pulling my hair out when working with him since it will take him an hour to hang one curtain rod. I’m incredibly impatient about everything. But during this project his precision was highly respected by me. We had other men stop by and admire his quality work. For someone who doesn’t do this everyday he sure does make it look easy. I have to brag on him because he has worked so incredibly hard. What an honor to work with him on something like this. I am still in awe of how he can figure any of this out. I’m so proud of you Big Daddy!!!

Even though I can’t remember how long any of this took, because let’s face it when you’re working in the middle of the night and everything hurts who’s calculating time anymore.

We were getting very close to our deadline which was March 7. The Market was having their annual store wide sale in celebration of their anniversary and I was determined to be done.

I lean to the pessimistic side but Big Daddy is all optimism all the time so when he calculated how long things would take he may have over promised a teensy bit.

It was Thursday and the framing was mostly done but we had a lengthy list of To-Dos still not checked off.

We needed bead board in the interior, interior trim, paint, exterior trim, paint, lights, platforms for the window…..this list went on an on. So I did what anyone would do in the middle of the night with 1 day left before the deadline. I had a melt down.

I was facing the facts. The harsh facts that I was letting other people down, my booth neighbors would be asked to endure more dust, more noise. And the exhaustion, oh how I could have slept for days, would continue without a finish line in sight.

But honestly I wasn’t in full blown melt down mode until we put up the bead board and discovered that my idea of placing vertical bead board horizontally would not work.

After we spent $20 per sheet on about dozen sheets and put them all up and caulked and filled and sanded a million nail holes, I stepped back to admire my handy work and all I could see were those obnoxious vertical lines where the panels just couldn’t get close enough to close up the seam. A full blown melt down commenced.

It was at this point I said I didn’t even care if I put one thing in my booth for sale on Saturday. I wasn’t going to make it. I had failed. You know it was a smattering of poor me and just cold hard facts.

I swept the floors for the 27th time that day, put away tools again, moved wood out of the way again, loaded the car with out supplies again, and drove home. On the way I cried. Big Daddy and I just felt each other’s disappointment and it was “this doesn’t look good” kind of drive home. Did I mention we live over an hour away? It was a long drive. But somewhere in the night Big Daddy’s pure optimism showed through. We agreed to get more bead board and install it vertically. It would go faster he said since we already did it once. Gotta love that optimism.

I felt horrible. It was my design after all that was the catalyst for this disaster. I hated the thought of spending more money and time on something I made a bad decision about.

But we pressed on. On Friday we came into the store with a renewed sense of commitment and hung more bead board until it looked like this.

I began painting around 3am and finished two coats. Unfortunately, I bought paint without primer in it and I didn’t wait long enough for the first coat to dry and the paint actually looked like it was melting off the wall. I’d never seen this before but at 5am I no longer cared about perfect.

Here is the painted wall before it randomly started to melt. The color is Revere Pewter by Benjamin Moore colored matched with Behr paint. It’s actually a beautiful color but I still feel like it reads a little too green in the booth. I might repaint at some point but right now we’re still trying to finish the basics.

While I was painting furiously, Big Daddy was trying to beef up the header to our facade with PureBond Plywood and warehouse lighting from Warehouse-lighting.com.

We finished up what we could including unloading a Uhaul full of my merchandise and staging it in the booth. We had a series of unfortunate accidents with dishes breaking and a mid century modern desk (that I loved) that would not make their debut in the booth. Ugh.

We were cleaning up around 8am and we both could barely stand. Seriously, it was that bad. We said good morning to several employees coming in to open the store and made a quiet exit for home. I was driving for about 30 minutes when I announced I was done. I pulled over into a church parking lot and we both fell asleep. What a scene that must have been for the random guy that pulled into the parking lot. We quickly dried our drool and Big Daddy took over the wheel. I really really really wanted to just be home in bed but we first had to take back to the Uhaul trailer. I finally fell into an overdue slumber around 11am. What a night.

When we left this is what the booth looked like. Aren’t those lights amazing? I’ll be writing more about the lights and the plywood next time.