1967 Etype 2+2 – Spring 2020 Progress Report

It has been a while since I have posted about the Restoration 2.0 of my 1967 Etype 2+2. What progress has there been, you might ask? Not much! In my defense, I have made some wonderful progress on our house. Right after the Christmas holidays, we had a wonderful craftsman come in and repaint all the kitchen cabinets in lacquer. They now look brand new again, so that’s a form of restoration, right? He also painted all the walls and trim on the first floor. After he finished, we had 2 more craftsmen come in and lay in a vinyl “floating floor” over the heartpine flooring on our first floor. This was a difficult decision, as the heart pine is beautiful. That said, you can only sand and seal tongue and groove flooring so many times and we had one sanding left. So we decided to go with a heart pine look vinyl flooring. It came out really well. My jobs were to remove everything from the kitchen cabinets (2 day job), support the painter, then partially remove everything from the first floor, remove the basemold, support the flooring guys, re-install the base mold, caulk it, apply touch up paint, move the furniture back in, etc. etc. This pretty much blew off the month of January. Right after that, one of the steps to my exterior porch collapsed due to rot. That led to all porch steps being replaced by me. That blew off another few weeks. There were a few days in there where I got to work on the Etype. I got the engine fired up. I re-assembled the front suspension parts. Re-checked ride height. Looked good, thank God, because I really really hate adjusting torsion bars. I set the torsion bars initially using the “setting links” as specified by the workshop manual. I did lot’s of little things. In early March, we got a call from my daughter, who lives with her husband and 2 kids in a 2 bedroom co-op in Queens, NYC. They were sensing that the Coronovirus thing was getting bad quickly and asked if they could come stay with us. Of course, we said yes. We have a large home with a basement. My wife has immune system issues so we decided to set up 3 separate quarantine zones. One for her, one for the daughter, and one for me. Guess who got the basement! Anyway, they came and got through a 2 week quarantine without issues. I am the “go out into the world” guy and pretty much am in continuous quarantine from the rest of them. 3 weeks later my other daughter arrived from Boston with her husband, daughter, dog, and cat. They got their own quarantine zone for 2 weeks. Things have finally settled down to some degree and I am finally getting to spend some time on the Etype. I have just spent a rediculous amont of time fettling with the doors to get them to close properly. I am going to post that as a separate article.

With the Coronovirus causing so much disruption to life in the US and the world, I am so thankful to be here in my little sanctuary. It’s a silver lining to a black cloud but it is wonderful to have my daughters and grandchildren here. I’m retired so there is no pressure to go to work. My wife and daughters are all able to work from home. We have it so good. So if you are so bored as to be reading my website, things must be truely desparate! Hang in there. We will all get through this. Stay well.

Life in quarantine zone 3: The Basement!