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.