Drywall, Priming, and Painting done! (almost)

It's been quite some time since I've posted on this house blog.

Not because we haven't been working, we have!  VERY hard.  

All of this drywall has been put on the walls!

 

We hired it done.

It only took them a week!

Check these guys out....

 Sure beats climbing up a ladder, then down the ladder, then moving the ladder, then up the ladder, then down the ladder, then moving the ladder....

 They left these here overnight and I wanted to try them....but I was afraid I'd hurt myself!

 

After the drywall guys finished, we went on a trip to St. Thomas for a wedding which I will post about on my other blog.  And when we returned, we started priming, and painting.

One day my friend Teresa and my cousin Gloria decided to come over and help!  Gloria got so full of drywall dust from scooting on the floor she went outside to shake it off before coming downstairs for lunch!  I really appreciated them helping.  We had a system down that day and we really got a lot of priming done.

Gloria came back on Thursday and we painted all day.  (we missed Teresa that day)

 There were a few times I did some painting on my own, which is no fun once you've had help. 

Dave and I painted/primed all day Saturday and on Sunday, Vickie and Robert came over and helped.  

Earlier that day Dave went after donuts, and I had texted him to get Vickie a donut on a stick. (her fave)  Well, he never got the text because he doesn't carry his phone with him.  So when she came over, he gave her a stick and told her to stick a donut on it if she wants a donut on a stick!

 Poor Robert....he is just so fun to bug.  I posted this pic on face book!

So here are a few pics of what we've done, or I should say Dave has done, since the painting is almost finished. (I still have the laundry room to paint)

Below is my kitchen.

 This light is in the entrance of our bedroom.

 We have matching ceiling fans in the bedroom, den, and living room.   He also got the sconce lights up and the windows trimmed out in the bedroom and den.

 And ta dah!!!  A closet that I cannot wait to use.

 

 This is the bedroom window ledge.  You can see I like to grow a lot of plants, and I don't like to kill them through the winter months so I bring them inside.  He made me a wide window ledge in the bedroom to put the plants on for the east morning sun.

 It's hard to see these lights, but they are stained glass sconce lights in the den.  He had them facing up at first because he didn't like seeing the light bulbs, but three of us ladies voted to turn them down. He put in different light bulbs, and agreed with us!

 And this peeps,  is my kitchen so far.....today......

I've been meeting with the kitchen guy again trying to make some decisions.  It's very hard to figure out what to do because on paper cabinets look way different than they do once they are installed.  And once they are installed it is way too late to make changes.  Same with flooring.  They give you a 5x6 piece of wood and expect you to make a decision on a room by looking at that little piece of floor! 
Anyway, it's moving along quite nicely now and I'm very excited.

Cindy

Fireplace, Breezeway finished! and a drywall story

If you follow along on my other blog, you know the month of May has been overwhelming. 

During it all,  we kept up on the 'house' stuff.  I didn't get pictures of everything, but I did get pictures of the fireplace we had installed.

 We had to get it installed so the dry wall guys could start!  Yes, we hired the drywall to be done. 

Another thing that had to be done, before the drywall guys could start was the entire main level had to be cleaned out.  So my cousin and her husband came and helped.  Vickie and I cleaned out the house while Dave and Robert insulated the stairway.  (Mom & Dad did the cooking!)

Breezeway FINISHED!

And Dave did finish this room about a month ago.  It's the breezeway.  I did show you some of the breezeway a few posts back.

Most of the wood in this room was reclaimed.

The grey panels hide

  this (below). And the middle grey panel is the electric panel.

 Here is a pic of the ceiling in case you forgot about the reclaimed barn wood we put up.

 Even the steps are reclaimed wood.  The post came from an old house that was being torn down for the highway.  The breezeway has a bit of an industrial look to it. 

 On top of the post is this old souvenir penny.  Dave has had it for years and years.

 It belonged to his Dad, who used to collect them as souvenirs on vacations.

 Since I took these pics, Dave has done a little bit of decorating in this room.  I'll show you that later. 

Here's a funny drywall story.  I can laugh now, but Friday....grrrrrrrr......

The drywall guys started Friday.  They were scheduled to start Tuesday, but as construction goes, it's always over budget and never on schedule.  So, Friday morning they came and were rockin' for about an hour.....then we lost power!  No storm, no wrecks, no blown circuits.  Dave did some investigating and found out that some box on the electric pole outside was busted and just hanging there!  So, all but one drywall guy left!  The one stayed because he could do some hand work, and didn't need electricity.  I asked Dave if there would be enough hot water in the hot water heater to take a shower.  "Sure", he said.  So I got in the shower, made sure I was going to have water before lathering up.  No problem.  Lathered up, washed my hair, put conditioner on it and was all soaped up when BAM!  No water!  Nary a drop.  So I got out, called Dave who was off visiting the neighbors.  He came home and said, "I forgot, the well pump is electric."  So, he went to the flowing well we have and got me some ICY ICY COLD water in a bucket so I could rinse the soap off, and the conditioner out of my hair.  About an hour later our lineman showed up and fixed the box on the pole.  He said they bought a bunch of cheap power boxes from Mexico and they are all randomly breaking!  What a day and it was only 11:00 AM!

Cindy

I hate meeces to pieces!

Am I ever behind.  So much so, that I'm going to try to post every this week to get caught up.  We'll see how that works out for me! 

So...back to April.....

Well first of all...Dave announced to everyone last year, that we were having Easter dinner this year at our house.  So by golly we're having Easter dinner at our house!

We decided to have it in our big room upstairs. We dug out tables from the pole barn and a couple hidden under 'stuff' in the house.  Some even had to be put together!

And Dave worked really hard installing a temporary toilet and some doors in the bathroom on the main level.  

 

I can't remember if I told you this story or not, but the door that leads from the master bathroom, into the bathroom, was small.  We agonized over re-doing the doorway to make it bigger.  We said all along that we were going to make everything in this house wheelchair/handicap accessible, or have the possibility of making it that way, in case we ever needed it.  We never want to move again!  So, after thinking about it for a couple of days, Dave took the header off, put up a new one, and widened the doorway.  But because of the studs, and the placement of the shower, we could only get a couple of inches.  Oh well, better than nothing.  It changed the doorway from a 30" to a 32", which also looks a lot better.

So, the last thing we needed for Easter dinner was heat.  As you know, we've been living in one room in this house in the basement for over two years now.  We have electric baseboard heat in that room.  But we will have natural gas heat for the house, when it is finished.  And in the long run, we'll probably heat with wood to save even more money, since we have about 25 acres of trees, that always seem to be falling over! We have also been using an electric water heater.  Gas is much cheaper than electric in our part of the world.   And if we needed to heat the upstairs for Easter, we needed to get the gas turned on.  So we made an appointment with the gas company to come out here.

The gas company got here and checked our water heater and furnace for leaks.  Nothing leaked! 
But the water heater would not run at all.   We could not figure it why it would not work.  Dave read and re-read the instruction manual, and called the company that makes the equipment.  And...ummmm....he knew more than the people at the other end of the phone when he called!  Not bragging, just fact.  Come to find out, the water heater had a wrong part on it from the factory!  

And the furnace...even the gas company was perplexed. The only thing they could figure out with the furnace was that maybe the company, or Dave, dropped a nut or bolt into the heater motor while working on it because when they turned it on there was a small noise that sounded kind of like a quarter tumbling in the dryer, when you don't empty the pockets first!  The furnace would turn on, but it would not stay on.  So the gas company could not turn on the gas.

After much talking I said, "Show me what you are talking about instead of telling me.  You never know, sometimes you show me stuff and it's the simplest thing that has been overlooked."
So we went in the "maintenance room" and he proceeded to explain stuff to me.
Like, did you know that you can only have so many "points" when you are venting a gas water heater or gas furnace.  And points are calculated by the length of the PVC pipe, and the bends in the PVC pipe.  So this bend coming out of the furnace is worth "X" amount of points.

And you can only have "X" amount of feet of pipe.  I'm using "X" because I can't remember the exact amounts.

  

Then we went outside to this little alcove between the house and the garage.

 

This alcove is where all of our "maintenance" type stuff was supposed to come out of the house.

As we were standing there talking I looked down at my feet, and there was a "nest" of some sort by my foot!  It was a perfect cylinder shape, like it came out of one of those pipes to the left (that are now capped off)

Dave said, "Oh my gosh, I bet we blew that birds nest out of the PVC pipe when we turned on the heater!"

I said, "That is not a birds nest, that is a mouse nest, and I bet you don't have a nut or a bolt in the heater motor, I bet you have a dead mouse!"

So, he took the motor apart on the furnace, and it wasn't a dropped nut or bolt, but mouse skulls bouncing around in the motor!  Not one, but three!  Not only that, but the mice chewed some of the fan blades in the furnace motor, which made it off balance, loud, and not able to vent properly.  So, we tried to order a new fan.  No Can Do.  We had to order an entire new motor which cost over $200.00.  This is for a furnace that has NEVER been used!

 He decided to inspect the heater some more, and found six more dead mice in the secondary heat exchanger!  Apparently, they got into the furnace and couldn't get back out!

And the thing is, he put screen in the pipe leading outside that goes into the water heater,

but has no idea why he didn't put it in the pipe for the furnace.  Probably got interrupted.

We were trying to figure out how mice could jump two feet high and get into the pipe anyway!

Someone Dave works with said they probably walked on the snow and got in there!  Whodathunkit?

After much deliberation, he decided to play it safe and re-run the PVC pipe from the water heater so that it would have less "points" in it.

So he took out the old, which is why it's capped off in the photo above,

and re-routed it straight through the maintenance wall,

 into and through the pantry,

and outside the house

here.

 

 And after thinking some more, he re-routed the furnace as well.

(and people wonder what is taking us so long!)

Building a house requires A LOT of thinking!

 And both pipes have screen in them.

 They now come out of the back of the house on the right side of the porch.  This porch has been a huge pain through this whole process. It's not big enough to use for anything, and it blocks any of the venting that could have been brought out of the house.

 Hence, drier vents on the porch.  Oh well, I doubt we sit back here much.

So anyway, that's the mouse story....we did get the gas turned on....and we did have Easter at our house!

 

However, there is still something wrong with the darn furnace!  AUGH!

Cindy