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No, we don’t have power yet. Thanks for asking, though. We wish that the parties responsible for providing us with power were half as concerned about our situation as you all are. (Note to Cherie’s co-workers: While she appreciates the interest that you all are showing in the state of the house, please stop asking about the electricity issue. Your concern is noted, but really, if you keep asking then Cherie is liable to break down in the middle of the office and start ranting about the power company and the electricity conspiracy against her. And that is just unprofessional.)
So, no, no power yet. Trust us, when we actually get power our joyful celebration will be heard not only across the state, but across the nation and possibly even internationally. At least in Canada.
But, the Great Electricity Conspiracy didn’t stop us from making our house look a little more like a house. A few rooms, at least.
First, the bathroom:
It’s been painted and tiled, and it also serves as an excellent example of why Cherie shouldn’t save picture-taking until the end of the workday when she is so tired that she can barely hold the camera up. The walls aren’t really that color; they really are darker and more green. Also, Michael did a stunning job of tiling the floor, but you can’t tell it from this shot.
This is a wee bit better. The color is closer to true, and you can see that the tub surround has been grouted, but the floor still isn’t showing its true good-lookingness. We’ll get some better shots. Someday.
Our bedroom has also improved and been badly photographed. Primer + floor = almost livable!
Now you are just about up-to-date. No power, pretty bathroom, improved bedroom. That’s pretty much our weekend.
Oh, and there was that little incident where the sun tunnel ate Michael’s head.
Perhaps the electricity gods were demanding a sacrifice. Or the solar gods were exacting revenge.
It was a bit of a tough weekend. Saturday we finished drywalling the bedroom ceiling with our friend Jen (Thanks Jen!), then we split up duties. Michael put the last coat of mud on the drywall in the kitchen, coated the front door with sealant, and installed a pocket door between the downstairs half-bath and the storage room under the stairs. He had it easy.
Cherie fought with the Hardibacker–the tough cement board used under tile. In this case, it was going in the upstairs bathroom and the entryway.
Need we even tell you that the Hardibacker won the battle?
Turns out that Hardibacker is, well, hardy. We’re not sure exactly what one is supposed to cut Hardibacker with, but all we had were razor knives. Cherie struggled to cut through the board, struggled to break it in the proper place in order to fit around whatever little niche or doodad that Michael had thoughtlessly placed in the way (like, um, the tub surround! And the toilet drain!), and struggled to screw it down to the subfloor. Screwing it down wasn’t difficult in itself, except that despite being the relative toughness of steel, this stuff is such a little baby that it needs to be screwed down every six inches. It took hours to do the bathroom, and then she had to head downstairs for the entryway.
You know, no matter how Zen you try to be about whatever housebuilding/renovation/home improvement project you are doing, you reach a point where you just can’t take it anymore. It just won’t work, and no matter how many deep breaths you take, you just can’t keep the rage and frustration from building and building until suddenly you find yourself screaming at inanimate objects.
We aren’t saying that’s what happened. We’re just saying that at around hour six of the Hardibacker experience, when the next to last piece just wouldn’t fit into its space for Cherie, no matter how bitterly she complained and how creatively she tried, and then Michael came over and it slid right into its spot for him…well. There were words. Impolite words.
Hardibacker in the bathroom:
And in the entryway. See the slate tile in the back, sorted by color and ready to go?
We showed up on Sunday still in slightly foul moods, but ready to sand the kitchen drywall and prime the walls and then lay the floor. There’s a proper order to these things, you know. Get the walls in order and then the floor.
But it rained. It rained! It was too humid for the drywall mud to dry. On the wall. Thus making a dry…wall. If the mud wasn’t dry, we couldn’t sand it. If we couldn’t sand it, then we couldn’t prime. And if we couldn’t prime, then we couldn’t lay the floor. Because who would lay a new wood floor in a room that needs to be sanded and painted? Who would do that?
We would do that.
Logic told us that we should just go finish the drywall in the bedroom and wait for better weather to sand and prime the kitchen and then do the kitchen floor. But our morale told us that we needed a kitchen floor.
Our morale was right.
Well, it arrived. The first overnight in our house. We had some work on the roof that needed to be done early in the morning before the shingles heated up and we needed to push ahead on the drywalling. So why not work late and stay over?
Saturday
9:00 Finally make it to the house. Finish the last tiny bit of framing: building in a shampoo niche in the shower, building the front edge for the tub, and framing the small door into the attic.
12:00 Lunch! Yay!
12:30 Begin drywalling the master bedroom. The cathedral ceiling that seemed like such a good idea back when we were putting in the rafters suddenly looks pretty daunting. Luckily, we were able to borrow a drywall lift from a kindly acquaintance (thankyouthankyouthankyou!) that made the job, if not easy, at least possible for two people.
1:00 Still drywalling.
2:00 Still drywalling. We said it was easier, not faster.
3:00 Still drywalling.
4:00 Still…you get the point.
5:00 After 5 hours of drywalling, we have managed to finish only one half of the cathedral ceiling and place one sheet on the other side. We weep for a bit.
5:15 We head back to our other house to forage for dinner supplies and fetch the dog.
6:00 Back on site. The dog gets a good run through the woods while we fire up the grill.
6:30 Grilled shrimp, mushroom, and onion kabobs with corn on the cob. Blueberries for dessert. Cherie begins blowing up the air mattress herself after Michael’s ingenious plan to use the air compressor fails utterly.
7:00 Back upstairs. We decide to abandon drywall. Cement board in the tub surround, then. During breaks, we continue to make ourselves lightheaded trying to inflate the air mattress. Dog begins campaign for another run through the woods.
8:00 It gets too dark to see and we are forced to fire up the generator so we can use the stadium light. (When are we getting power, anyway? Sheesh.) The air mattress is getting full, but our brains are shutting down from lack of oxygen. Dog has turned her back on us entirely.
9:00 Start to feel bad for being “Those Loud People” in the neighborhood. Consider that the house next door, which has three small children, probably deserves better. Turn off generator.
9:05 Decide to go have a look at the meteor shower that is supposed to be taking place right now. Grab sleeping bag, emergency bottle of port, and newly awake dog.
9:10 Settle down in the open space of the power line easement on our property. Get ready to have romantic evening communing with nature.
9:11 Dog sits bolt upright and stares intently in one direction, extremely tense and in full alert mode. We shine our flashlights around entire area, listening to every little noise from the woods, convinced that the dog is protecting us from rabid raccoons or vicious coyotes. See no evidence of any animal of any kind.
9:20 Realize that the dog is actually protecting us from the headlights of cars passing on a nearby road. Express our disgust with the world’s most useless watchdog and settle back down.
9:30 We see a meteor.
9:40 We see another one.
9:50 Another one.
10:00 C: Well, that’s about all the fun I can stand.
M: I think I just fell asleep.
10:15 We set up the air mattress and sleeping bags by lantern-light in the master bedroom. It’s just like camping, only without bugs or rocks in our backs or raccoons trying to eat our food. The dog settles into her bed (which is 100 times more comfortable than our air mattress) and we shut off the lantern.
10:15:03 The dog hits the air mattress and wedges herself between us, shaking uncontrollably. Apparently our new house fills her with even more terror than car headlights.
10:30 Dog still shaking.
11:00 Dog still shaking. We give up hope of calming her and go to sleep.
Sometime in the next hour: The dog goes to sleep.
3:00 Michael gets kicked in the head by the dog one too many times and boots dog.
7:30 Holy crap. Do we really need to get up?
8:00 Michael hits the roof–literally. Cherie spends the next two hours handing tools up through a hole in the roof as he installs the vent in the bathroom and the sun tunnel.
10:00 More drywall. Oy.
Okay, we’ll spare you the rest of the drywalling. Boy, that timeline thing gets old. Here’s what the bedroom looks like:
(We don’t know why the photo looks like that. Too much dust in the air, maybe?)
Other side:
The finished bathroom:
And the finished dog:
And so ends the housebuilding marathon. We won’t be doing it again next weekend because we will have another houseguest! Those people never learn.
Sorry to be so late with the weekend update. We had to clear some more trees for the septic system tonight after work and were a little busy trying to stop a stubborn tree from falling into the road and taking out phone service to the entire subdivision. Oh, and we were trying to accomplish this task before it got dark and while mosquitos attempted to carry us away to the next county. It was absolutely, 100% as fun as it sounds and it was one of those moments when we were thinking, “Boy, this housebuilding thing is the best idea we ever had!”
We had planned to give you the full story about this weekend because it was really exciting and we felt very accomplished. Here’s the short version:
Drywall.
Heh. Okay, the slightly longer version:
We are beginning our push to make at least part of our house livable. The priority rooms are the kitchen, the upstairs bathroom, the master bedroom, and the laundry room. This weekend two of them got walls (mostly).
Here’s the kitchen before:
And now:
That last little bit is nothing to worry about. It’s getting plywood to provide more support for cabinets.
Moving along, upstairs there is the bathroom.
Before:
And after:
From these pictures you should notice two things:
1) We are missing pieces here too. We ran out of drywall. Not a problem, we aren’t panicking. They are easy pieces.
2) The color of the moisture resistent drywall in the bathroom is the exact same green as the handle of the left-handed scissors used in elementary school art classes across the nation, the kind that never worked right and, as a result, only made it more noticeable that the left-handed kid was a bit of a freak who couldn’t cut construction paper properly.
Upon reflection, that might just be Cherie’s issue. But that is the same green.
How about this alternate:
2) The bathtub is no longer sitting on our front porch, but instead is upstairs. In the bathroom. Like a real, grown-up bathtub.
We are very proud. Perhaps it should have a talk with the trees about how inanimate objects behave in our household.
Well, we survived the 16-hour one-way road trip to Western Pennsylvania, despite the best efforts of Interstate 80 to trap us forever in that state. We foiled you, Interstate 80! You and your endless construction!
Also, did you know that a faulty alternator can overcharge your battery, causing said battery to spew sulfuric acid all over your car and, in the process, creating one of the most putrid scents known to humans? We didn’t know that either. We do now.
But, we’re fine. And we’re home. And look what the insulation fairies left us downstairs,
and upstairs.
We continue to be amazed by the miracle of hiring people. Things were accomplished…but we didn’t do them? How is this possible?
We hired out the insulation because insulating, frankly, is a lousy job. It would have taken us close to a week swathed head-to-toe in protective clothing and dust masks to accomplish what this team did in a day. Plus, they can purchase insulation at a bulk rate, which means that hiring them to do this only cost us a few hundred dollars more than the insulation itself would have. 100% worth it. No question.
(For those interested in such things: that’s R-19 insulation in the walls plus a vapor barrier and R-30 insulation in the roof. We will be adding another layer of R-19 in the attic crawlspace. The cathedral ceiling in the master bedroom, which won’t have the benefit of attic insulation, got R-38. Oh, and we sealed the heck out of every header, window, and seam before the insulation went in.)
Hey, how was the trip, anyway? Well, we got to spend quality time with some of Michael’s family.
And we got to do this:
Automobiles, weaponry, and fairies. Not your ordinary houseblog.
