The second showroom had been used during the restoration of the front showroom as a shop and staging area, and now needed to be restored itself. All the shelving and wall coverings were removed.

Though the restoration of the first section of the building had been accomplished in nine months, the second section was to take twice that. While the walls in the first section had been wainscotted or plastered, the second room walls were bare brick hidden under cardboard and paneling. These really needed repointing, since the mortar loss was soon going to start being brick loss which turns into building collapse.

I quickly researched restoration guidelines and heard tales about the expense of professional restoration. On one of the shop windows on our south side, I spotted a flyer posted by a local handyman who was advertizing as a brick pointing wizard. His references were pretty fair, his experience with his uncle was extensive, and he was very reasonable. He spent three months repointing the west outside wall and rebuilding a section of parapet damaged in the fire at the Phoenix Opera House. Then he went inside and repointed the second room.

We realized that the two large rooms upstairs needed this work even more than the downstairs, but there was nothing in the budget for it while we were building inventory and trying to enlarge the showrooms.

The ceiling was stripped of corrugated tin with which about half of it had been covered around 1905 It was then furred level by Floyd Worth in the summer of 2002, and new tin was ordered from Toronto to do the entire room.

With the completion of the scaffold and the furring for the new ceiling, the Worths returned to Idaho for the year, having made another major contribution to the project.

The blue car is a Citroen 2CV hiding indoors from the winter weather, and the white coating on the framing in the last photo is mortar dust from grinding out the brick joints. It may seem odd to future restorers who some day may decide to remove the "old 2003 ceiling" and expose the dust coated original joists and arrays of hanging nails...

It was hard to thin about waiting through most of the winter for the weather to be warm enough to prime and paint the bare steel "tin" ceiling material in the unheated back room. The idea of putting the tin up bare, as was often done in the 1880s, was adopted and work resumed before the warm weather returned. Our next door neighbor Jim Hankins and I continued with the ceiling. Floyd's furring strips were paneled over with the luan paneling taken from the walls, and the bare sheet steel was applied over the flat paneling. This was all done with air-nailer brads, but even then our shoulders let us know how unhappy they were about the work. We wore cotton gloves so fingerprints would not cause rusty spots on the bare steel panels which were intended to age slowly into a dark finish. Of course, they could be sealed or painted anytime a specific change was wanted. By mid-April 2003 it was largely done.

With the room stripped, it was clear that the water line zigzagging across the shop had simply grown that way. It snaked from the northeast corner by the front windows, back over the center of the two long rooms and out the back wall to where a little bath was installed under a staircase in the post-and-beam third room. This line had hidden just above the dropped ceiling in dead air space, but that space was now open.

So the water was run along a baseboard outlet box down the east wall of the first and second showrooms, snaked across the back door of the second showroom and into the bath. Whew. This meant it ran for a considerable distance along an outside brick wall, which is a perfect recipe for a freezing problem.
 

Baseboard outlets were installed in the same box, and the thick baseboard was run all around the second room with outlets. You know how old fashioned baseboards have a high flat board and some stacked moldings at the top? Well, the big round part of that molding was made of pvc pipe, right out in the air, with insulation between it and the brick, and the water ran through it, being really kind of out in the room anyway. The bathroom drains froze a few times, but the water supply made it through the worst nights.

The new furnace went in hidden in a horizontal box following the design of the one in the first showroom and seemed to disappear into mix of furniture and displays.
 

The floor then got the cracks scraped out and cleaned, Shaw carpets were placed, and one of the pair of magnificent walnut counters was brought out of its exile in the third room. A bakers cabinet traded to Roger's Bakery for the aluminum front door was pressed into service for candies, several shelving units from the hardware store front room were revitalized and installed, and we renamed the store South Side Home & Kitchen Emporium.
 

The next project was to remove and rebuild the windows one by one, reusing the original materials as much as possible. Acrylic sheets were placed inside the original sash forming an air-tight storm window since we now had heating and air conditioning. Crocheted curtains finished off the lower sashes and green roller shades covered the top when needed. It was a little fancier than the hardware store had ever seen, though the integrity of the building was really well respected.

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