D DAY

After an extremely busy and exhausting weekend working on the kitchen, today is the day.  We finally are getting drywall.  This that means that there is an end in sight.  And I would love to say I am crazy giddy about that but I think I am too tired to be giddy right now. 

Friday morning started with the delivery of the drywall.  We originally planned to have them put in our living room behind the couch as we don't have too many 8' long walls in the house that don't have big pieces of furniture on them.  But when the guys arrived, I found out the pieces were 12' (I didn't even know they made 12' x54" pieces), so we had to quickly come up with plan B-why not the porch?  Luckily, the guys weather wrapped the drywall before leaving.

I spent the first part of the day running around town with Ben picking up cabinet lights, skirt boards for the stairs and a bunch of other miscellaneous materials that we needed for the weekend. 
Sounds easy enough, right?  
Well, a little wrench ran into the whole operation when I was driving our neighbor's rig down Sandy Blvd and the windshield wipers stopped working.  And let me remind you that Portland got 1.1" of rain Friday.   So this is actually not that uncommon for the rig, but usually you can just switch this after market switch and the wipers will start up again.
Not the case.  So just picture me talking to my neighbor's dad on my cell phone while pulled over on Sandy Blvd with my butt hanging out of the hood of the rig and trying to fix the wipers.  I actually (with direction over the phone) figured out where the wiper motor was (1 point) and what needed to be done to get them working again (2 points).  However, I couldn't keep pressing the motor towards the windshield wiper while simultaneously driving.  SOOOO, luckily, the rain was slow at that point.  What I did was just hang out of the window at each stop light and wipe the window off with my hand.  Quite a ghetto sight.  Thankfully I didn't have to go far and the rain held up to no more than a sprinkle until I got home.
PS  I am pretty proud of myself for strapping all of those 15-16 foot board to the rig by myself in the rain

Steve took half of Friday off and got the old flooring ripped out. Not sorry to see the linoleum go but Steve taking out the pristine old growth fir subfloor just about killed me.  I am a preservationist at heart.  I also want to salvage all that I can.  But after seeing the shape of our fir floors in our bedrooms, we knew that the soft wood would not hold up to the daily abuse that a kitchen and back yard access area undergoes (plus we have a dog door in the kitchen as well).  I almost wanted to cry. 
Unfortunately, we did not have the time to take each board up slowly one by one and be able to preserve them so that they can be used for someone else's flooring.  However, we have tons of gorgeous 9-10' strips that I just pray someone will be able to use for a craft, woodworking or other home improvement project.  I plan to put them up on craigslist this week. 

Saturday seemed like it lasted for-ev-er.  Steve and I our electrician were at it for 10 hours.  Steve did a ton of electrical prep, like putting in 2x4s so that we could put our backsplash outlets in horizontally (I feel like this looks more period appropriate and makes the outlets less noticeable.), and measuring out exactly where we wanted all the outlets.  He also had to do a little bit more framing in the stairwells to get it all prepped for drywall.  I honestly can't even remember everything else he did.

all ready for drywall

Yesterday was also miserably long.  I think Steve started before 9am and we didn't finish last night until 10:45 pm.  I was gone in the morning as Ben fried his brain Saturday with way too much Dora the Explorer so we escaped to the Children's Museum in the morning.  Of course we let him fry his brain again Sunday afternoon with Mighty Machines on netflix.   Oops-not stellar parenting but we had a deadline to meet. 
Anyways, yesterday consisted of:

• Steve working with the electrician to finish everything up, 
• re-threading the doorbell wire, 
• hanging all the insulation (that was my job),
•  recessing some pipe that was sticking too far out from the wall to allow for drywall
• hanging tile board
• hanging plastic in the basement and attic to keep dust down during drywall
• putting paper on the floor in front of the attic stairwell to protect it during drywall
• leveling and securing the built-in-no small task with the built-in being brittle and 100 years old and working with walls and floors that aren't square.  It took Steve over 3 hours for this task along but he did an awesome job.

We also had a bunch of small stuff but the important thing is that this phase of the project is done-thank goodness!  Since we didn't have time to put in the subfloor, Steve and his brother (who stopped by yesterday afternoon and ended up helping out for about 6 hours-sooo nice of him) had the wise idea of cutting and stapling a tarp to the floor.  This way, most of the drywall dust should settle on the tarp instead of the basement floor.

Ben had a blast coloring on the wood-he probably thought I was the coolest mom ever for letting him do it-a fun surprise for whomever rips these walls out someday (hopefully not for another 100+ years)

Not I am just here twiddling my thumbs waiting for the dry-wallers who were supposed to arrive 2 hours ago. I could have taken a nap while Ben and Laurel are napping.  Oh well.   I hope they come soon.