We passed our insulation inspection with flying colors and now have permission to cover up the walls with drywall. We originally planned to drywalling ourselves, but then looked into seeing if our mudder knew anybody. He came back with a price we couldn’t beat. So on Saturday morning Francisco and his buddy came by. A few short hours later the entire project was drywalled.
I’ve never seen anybody move so fast. These guys were actually running around the house while working. All we needed to do was finish a couple of framing things and try to keep them supplied with drywall.
On Sunday we took the day off after doing some cleaning and Francisco started mudding the walls to make them smooth. Mudding is an art that it just doesn’t pay to do yourself. You can never be as good as a professional. You can never be as fast, and its cheap work ($500). Unless there is a hole that needs to be patched you will never catch me mudding and sanding.
By the end of the weekend the rooms had finally come together to look like actual living space. The bathroom had walls, the windows were surrounded by drwall, you could no longer see through to the outside, and a huge plus or plumber returned to install our new upstairs toilet.
With Liz finishing the painstaking cleaning of the slate tile we had a functional bathroom after five weeks of using the nasty and scary basement toilet.
By the middle of the week we could finally move back in, although we remained at Liz’s mom house because of the regular traveling for the holidays and the funeral in Galveston, TX.
I have two words for you: Heat Gun.
I fell in love with this device about 5 seconds after using it when the paint began to bubble and peel off immediately. My previous experiences working with chemical strippers left me frustrated and with unattractive results.
Perhaps they are more effective if you are not attempting to remove 10 layers of paint at once. After a couple of hours of layering on the stripper, waiting for it to work, scraping off some of the paint and then repeating this process again and again, only to be left with wood that looked uneven and splotchy, I was considering giving up and giving in and just paint it all. I decided to try another chemical that is supposed to remove 7 layers of paint (right up my alley) and be stronger than the others. I would say it was even less effective than the others.
I thought I’d give it one last try with the heat gun, and after about 5 minutes of fiddling with it to get the hang of it, I was removing paint in long strips leaving a clean board behind. So, here is my how to strip paint with the heat gun: (more…)
Thor, Matt and I spent the week dry-walling in the living room where the half wall was removed, cleaning gooped up paint off the walls and cleaning up the disgusting mess created by the insulation that rained down when we took off the kitchen ceiling. This stuff was so foul that Thor even broke down and wore a face mask.
Friday:
We were trying to clean up because Thor was hoping to move in over the weekend. The goal was to have things cleared out at home to move them and to have the sanding done and things clean so we can bring things in on Saturday. I was at home cleaning when Thor called me in despair. The spackle wasn’t drying, there was no way to finish sanding and things were a wreck. An adjustment to our plans needed to be made, and it’s hard to admit the goals you set are a little too ambitioius. Fortunately help was on the way. (more…)
Tags: bbq, cabinets, cleaning, drywall, janis, meg, moving, pat, randy, salvage, sanding, scrap metal, sink, spackle, stripping, trim
