Drywall Inspection Passed!

Well, we had our drywall inspection today. We passed! And we learned a little something.

First off, the inspector pointed out that we missed some screws on the ceiling ( just 3 or 4). Oops! We'll have to put those in. He was surprised that we used green wallboard. He said that the white stuff actually resists mold better and that the city no longer allows green wallboard on the ceiling in bathrooms or kitchens. Good to know! He did say that we were fine to keep the green wallboard in the living/dining room.

The next inspection is after we've painted and installed the trim. We don't have to have flooring in. He also said that we likely didn't need another electrical inspection, but we'll check with L&I just in case.

We'll be assembling the walls for the built-in bookcase this week and weekend. Here's a 3D picture that we did in SketchUp to explore what it will look like.

We'll be starting to mud and tape, too. This is something my spouse can do when ever she wants. I'll likely do a lot of the ceiling and she'll do the walls. We'll be borrowing a few tools from some friends this weekend (hopefully). Otherwise, we'll have to buy a corner trowel.

Drywall = Done

Three-day weekends are good for so very many reasons, regardless of what you do for a living or what hobbies you have, but we've found that we appreciate three-day weekends so much more now that we have the rat hole. It lets us get so much done on the house, and we can work a little time for play in there as well.

I'll just get right to it - we finished off hanging the drywall in the living/dining room this weekend, and we're now ready for our drywall inspection. Yay! Hopefully that will happen this week, and then we can begin the long process of putting on the joint compound. Luckily mudding is something that's easy to do on my own, so I can work on it in the evenings after I get off work. (Wait, that actually doesn't sound like very much fun...oh well.)

Here's the front of the fireplace, with all the drywall on.

And here's the door into the kitchen. We're really able to see the impact the rounded corners have on the doors, and we really like it.

To answer Acme66's question - yes, we're going to do the same treatment with the doors that currently exists in the nook. We're going to put that simple trim around the edge of the doorways. In the case of the nook, the trim will actually bump up against the walls, which I think will be fine. We'll probably end up painting it white so it contrasts with whatever color we paint the walls.

Here's the hall doorway, with complete drywall and rounded corners.

We also did work on the built-in bookshelf. We ended up undoing the framing we had originally done (which you can see in the pic at the top of the post) and put in a header instead so we could have deeper bookshelves (ones that would actually fit books bigger than paperback size). You can see the mockup we did.

We think it'll work out really well - we'll have plenty of room for our largest books and photo albums at the bottom, and then several normal shelves. We'll probably end up putting our phone on one of the shelves, too.

Here are the shelves with the drywall on, so you can get a sense of the bookcase. We'll be putting rim around the perimeter so that it has a nice transition.

On Saturday morning, we went to the hardwoods store and got some really nice cherry plywood, so that's what we'll be making the back, top and bottom, sides, and shelves out of. We ran out of time this weekend and didn't get at least the back installed, so we'll have to get started on that part next weekend.

Still, it feels really good to have the room coming together. It's going to be great! We've almost saved up enough money to actually have someone else do our roof, and once that happens, we can finish installing our Solatubes and finally have our skylight light in the room, too. We're getting very excited.

We're also still staying realistic about how crappy the rat hole still is, though, so don't worry. We had our lawnmower repaired, and the guy dropped it off on Friday. He was VERY suspicious that we knew how to actually use a lawnmower after he took a look at our yard. He did not approve at all. Luckily I was only amused and not offended at all. I know how crappy our house looks and our yard is. And hey, our lawnmower was broken. It looks better when our small patch of lawn is mowed. So whatever. We found it funny that someone was so horrified by our yard. That's probably some sort of coping mechanism. Still, we're making progress, little by little. Only a little more than a month until the next three-day weekend.

Flowers and Corners

We had amazing weather over the weekend, and because of various events, we really only got to work on the house for one day. It was so nice out that we did a bit of work in the garden, including taking out the monster blossoms our rhubarb plant put out.

The rhubarb needed trimming, especially since it was choking one of our hedge plants (which are really getting big and bushy, by the way), and we want to plant tomatoes over there later, too. Everything's flowering, including our chives. I had never seen chive blossoms before, and I think they're really cute.

Our big project of the weekend, though, was putting corners up in the doorways. You may recall that the doorway into the nook has rounded corners, and that we wanted to round the corners of the doorway between the living/dining and the kitchen and the hallway in the living/dining room. So my spouse used a router to manufacture multiple rounded corners.

Then there was shimming to make the doorway actually square and level.

And here are the corners installed. They harmonize really well with the ones in the nook, as you can hopefully sort of see in the photo.

And here's the doorway into the hallway:

All in all, we're really, really pleased with the way the rounded corners worked out. We're getting pretty close, and the room is feeling really good. I think it will turn out even better than we hoped, but time will tell. Regardless, it's exciting!

Long Time

We have a good reason for taking so long to post this time - we were out of town. ^_^ If I'm feeling frisky (which I might, once this post-vacation cold goes away), I might post a pic or two. We saw wonderful people and had a fabulous time.

Now back to work. This weekend we're going to try to get stuff done on the house, outside if it's nice, and inside if it's not. The goal is to finish up drywall and install the second Solatube.

In the meantime, here's what we did the last weekend of April, right before we went on our trip. That Saturday was absolutely beautiful. It was warm and sunny, and was a single day of the spring we haven't really had so far. So, we decided to work outside. A long time ago, a friend of ours and my spouse moved a lot of really nice rock that a business associate let us have for free. We put it at the end of our driveway, since that was the easy place to dump it, and told ourselves we would use it to build a retaining wall along our driveway and the address post at the end. I think you know how that turned out.

Well, we finally moved that rock and got some of our driveway back, or at least a place where we can put another planting bed. That spot gets good sun all day, so it would be a great place to grow fruits and veggies. The brown patches in the photo is where the rocks used to be. They were completely overgrown with grass, and we saw all sorts of quality creepy-crawlies during the excavation.



Our neighbor's dog would come over to play with us while we moved rocks. He's a sweet dog, and kept us distracted enough that moving the rocks wasn't too monotonous, but not SO distracting that we didn't get anything done. Plus I got some good dog-playing time in. I love dogs. Anyway, we had initially been piling the rocks by hand. After a couple of tiring hours we realized that we owned a wheelbarrow. It went a lot faster then. Better late than never, I guess.

We figure we probably moved about 2 tons of rock. Now it's under the trees where it won't bother anybody, and also won't grow grass (although moss isn't out of the question).





We took bets on how long it will be before we actually do anything with the rock. I think at least seven; my spouse thinks four. We'll see. It'll probably end up being more like 15, knowing us.

The next day we finished up installing our fireplace by putting in the outside air kit. This necessitated a trip under the house, which I refuse to do. Luckily the ol' spouse is a super trooper - here he is, as seen through the hole he cut in our floor.



Here's the vent thing that he installed under the house, which we connected to the ducting.



Here's the fireplace before and after the connection.





And the fireplace blower and outside air kit were installed and the fireplace finally complete and ready to function at its best!

After that, it was time to finish the rest of the fireplace. So, we installed drywall around the chimney pipe.





Finally we did the front drywall panel.



It's still a bit weird to not see the back of the fridge, but somehow I think we'll manage. The place is looking more and more like an actual room with each baby step. It's getting exciting!