I was told that the plain ceilings and walls go pretty fast, but the closets are another thing. Some time back we made a spontaneous decision to take advantage of our tall ceilings by incorporating a built in cabinet above each bedroom closet as seen below.
As we start the finishing work, it dawns on us why most builders would never do that - its going to add a hell of a lot of work. So the sheetrock crew of 7 (of which only Pedro had some limited english) worked until 10PM Thursday night, and they did get the job "done".
Friday morning we started looking at what happened. Luckily the sheetrock is held up by screws because suddenly it became obvious that an electrical wire shouldn't be just sticking out of the wall.
So the carpentry crew got that fixed after we figured out there should have been an electrical outlet down there. Two other aspects of that picture: the purple sheetrock is the water-and-mold-resistent stuff - we still call it "greenboard." And a mistake made by the haning crew - that I didn't even realize for a few days - the doorway in the foreground is "wrapped" with sheetrock, but a door will get hung there so the 4.5" vertical strip of sheetrock will have to come off.Here's Erik (on the Carpentry crew) digging out the 12 switch boxes that the Thursday night madness covered over (1 or 2 would be expected, 12 is over the top). Those pictures I took of the wall guts turned out to be very handy a lot sooner that expected.
The sheetrock sure makes things look tidy though. Laundry room with circuit panel below.
On Saturday the sheetrock finishing crew (only 2 guys) showed up. Rudolfo's taping techique was amazing but I didn't get any pictures because I was too busy fixing up some last minute issues with the kitchen stove hood vent.
With the sheetrock on the ceiling upstairs we could finish the insulation. For the attic we went with blown cellulose, which amounts to shedded recycled paper. The cellulose crew brought a truck that pumps the stuff through a 4 inch hose.
It starts in bales...
gets fed into the hopper (I gather from the suit that routine exposure to fine particles, even if it is newspapers, is a bad idea)
Then the hose goes up to the attic and sprayed.
Resulting in what you see below. If you look closely to the left side of the second truss from the bottom you can see a little paper depth gauge they put in to tell when they had filled the requisite ten inches.
Meanwhile Rudolfo ...
and Marco returned to put the second coat of sheetrock mud on.
These guys did very quick and nice work, with almost no mud spilled. They were back on Wednesday for the final coat.
The following sequence shows the layers of sheetrock finishing. First the corners and joints are taped in bed of mud and the screw heads are covered...
A second coat then a skim coat is applied which just fattens things out a bit
and after that dries for a couple of days it is sanded.
The sanding crew was a different set of guys who showed up Sunday morning. Charla had to go up there first thing and tell them to quiet down since Sunday-as-a-day-of-rest is still something that is observed in this neighborhood (at least in the morning). And here is some more cool sheetrock technology - check out this sander:
That's a 10 inch sanding head with a vacuum hose attached. The unit weighs about 70 pounds when it gets full. That much less dust to deal with inside the house - a good idea!Meanwhile progress was made last week on the siding
The break half-way up is the band board that we will attach the grape arbour to.I thought I should get a picture of our house from the road before we cover the white tyvek with the "camou" siding. We are tucked up behind Junior Lewis' place.
And here is the old house we are staying in with the new one behind.
A little more progress on the back-filling - now we can get in the back door (which Rich our builder insists on calling the front door) without a ramp, although its still a pretty big step!
The backfill took a bite out of the pile in front:
And finally today's nature shot: the flock of wild turkeys that frequent this holler
