Drywall is up!

Friday the drywall guys started.  They started by measuring the stairs like 5 times just to be sure…  Kieren, the boss guy exclaimed in his thick irish accent, “I was up all night thinking about this.”  Sure enough, a sheet of drywall doesn’t fit up the stairs… It’s really close though.  I think every guy measured the stairs just to be sure.  So, they began the painstaking alternate way to get drywall up.  Scaffolding and a window.

Here’s a picture through the kitchen window.  One guy stands at each level of the scaffolding and they hoist the drywall up one sheet at a time.

There were 6 guys I think.  They needed that many to get all the drywall into the house.  After all the drywall was in, they went to town hanging it.  Since there were so many guys, it went really fast.  They hung everything they had but they were short maybe 3 sheets.

I’ll give you a tour.  Lets start in the laundry/closet:

Moving on to the bathroom

If we go around into the hallway

And peek in the half bath

Turn around from there and head into the den. Here we had a beam wrapped and the ceiling covered. The ceiling was in good shape but there was some Calcimine peeling and the easiest thing to do is to cover it. We have a bit of calcimine peeling here and there in the house but we can patch little spots. The den ceiling was the worst area.

and the beam in the den was wrapped

If we run up to the 3rd floor, we can take a peek in the “boy’s room” and see all the plaster mixing equipment as well as some of the patch work they did there.

Some interesting things to note: The pros all called the drywall “blue board.” At first I thought maybe it was some Massachusetts thing. Maybe they call it blue board because the old kind was blue or something. But no, it really is a blue/gray color. It’s lighter and stiffer than traditional drywall and has a tiny bit of texture on the surface. I’m interested to see what it looks like after they put up the plaster. The bags they have are labeled Veneer plaster. I’m not sure if that’s different than the stuff I’ve seen before. I’ve always used pre-mixed Spackle and I assumed that’s what the pros would use just not pre-mixed.

Have you had drywall done before? Was the drywall blue? What kind of mud did they use?

It’s been a dusty weekend and they haven’t even started sanding. Two more days and I’ll get to work cleaning! Yayyy Walls.

Sarah

P.S. We kept our bedroom at 62 degrees last night. It’s been set to 52 all winter but now that we have walls, normal sleeping temperatures it is! It was glorious!

The Drywall guy is coming!

We were up late-ish last night getting things cleaned up. The drywall guy is going to do another walk through tonight (Wed) and hopefully start on Thursday!.

It’s so nice to have everything cleaned up. Lots of work but it feels so good!

3rd Floor Bath


Den

Master Bath

Master Bedroom

Master Closet/Laundry

If all goes according to plan, another couple days and I’ll have drywall pictures to share!!! I’m so excited. Can you tell?

eeek. Drywall!

Sarah

Pre-Drywall Update – April 6&7

We’ve been living in a construction zone for far too long, but at least the bühnentechnik kaufen contractors are in charge of the project. I’m so ready for drywall it’s not even funny. The good news is the house is just about ready too!  And we love it, there were just a couple things that we wanted to change up. Let’s start top-down. The 3rd floor is looking good. There is still a bit of trash that needs to be hauled out but there is a new window, strapping on the walls, and the ceiling has been appropriately neatened and readied for drywall.

We’ve got a bit more trash and some super heavy metal pieces that need to be taken out. We may very well just leave the metal until we can get some friends over to help carry them out. I’m not sure Stefan and I can lift them since theyre such a high grade of pipe from varnerpipe.com.

The second floor didn’t have much done to it this weekend. I’ve carried out tons of trash and scrap wood. We still need to carry the “good” wood to the basement and perhaps move some doors down. The tools are gathered but not yet put away. You can see we have some heavy metal pieces and a little more trash that just needs to be straitened.

The Hallways is looking much clearer.

Just waiting for the go-ahead to move all this stuff to the basement.

The first floor is really where the magic happened this weekend.

Vector helped us pull wires in the kitchen ceiling.

It was a whole-family operation. I was on a step stool pulling, Stefan was on the 8 ft ladder feeding the wires and Vector was on the 6 ft ladder supervising.

We also framed in the microwave cabinet. We’re going to have this drywalled so we needed to build the appropriate “bump out” for the pipes etc, we need to ask a builder for this.

We also moved the light box for the one side of the kitchen to where the opening is. It puts it more in the center of the room and helps balance the room with all the new cabinets. Also putting in a new box there is going to be way easier than trying to replace the old one.

The residual items are the conduit in the master bedroom, tacking up some jam-extensions on the 4 new windows we put in, and a final bit of plumbing clean-up so that plaster dust doesn’t fill up our pipes. Monday is going to be devoted to plumbing and clean-up. Clean up goes much better in the daylight since I have to arrange the bagster that I talked about last week. I’m hoping we’ll also get the conduit done. That just leaves the moldings which I think I can work on while Stefan handles the plumbing and conduit work. Luckily, there are 24 hour plumbers near me. My current goal is to have the drywall guys start on Wednesday depending on their schedule. Stefan is calling them today to get things settled time-line wise.

Next weekend we have some non-drywall required things to take care of like electric, yard-work, and basement cleanup that we can work on if the drywall is going to take a bit. I’m really hoping it will be either late this week or early next week.

Sarah

P.S. I went to another George estate sale and got something AWESOME. Stay tuned 🙂

House Update – Pre-drywall

The pre-drywall phase is taking longer than I had hoped but I always hope too much. We’ve still got another weekend of work but it’s definitely looking good.

We have the durock backerboard up for the shower.

The plumbing supply is 99% done with just a bit of clean-up left.  The 3rd floor floor is down.

The big things left are replacing a window, framing in the “microwave closet” and pulling a couple wires in the kitchen ceiling

and  a whole lot of cleaning:

To get us started on the clean-up phase, we got one of those bagsters.   It was the least-complicated way to get rid of everything.  It’s pricey at $39 for the bag and another $160 to have it picked up but you pay for convenience.

I spent a bunch of time hauling piles of trash in the backyard into the bagster since we are finally snow-free!

It’s the “little” things that are killing us right now.  The final bits of tacking up wire, stripping wire, tacking up wood here and there, put the last light box up, pull an extra ethernet etc.  We have a list 50 lines long of little things we need to do.  Not very satisfying and not very blog-worthy.

Sarah