Bob was over again for a full day working on the house. I had work work I needed to catch up on, and so I spent most of my time in the office, working on my computer. But luckily, Liz was around and worked alongside Bob to help put in some new support beams on the first floor.
Earlier in the week, Bob was over and put up a lot of drywall by himself. I’m still awed by this, as each sheet of drywall is pretty heavy (about 75 pounds per sheet).
This morning, everyone was up early in Valparaiso. Julie and Liz were up, prepping for a day of shopping and visiting with Katie. Bob and I were up and ready to head back to Hyde Park for work on the house. Bob and I left around 8:30 AM, and headed to Medici’s for breakfast. After that, we were back at the house and getting to work in the master bedroom.
Last night, Bob came over around the time that I got home from work. The two of us then brought up some plywood from the basement, and got some pieces set to fill in the gap that we cut out of the bedroom ceiling.
Today, I felt better – but I could still tell I was a bit off. That said, I did some small bit of work around the house. While Bob was working on setting up a furnace on our second floor, I did a bit of light demo, cleaned up a lot of trash around the house, and relocated the lights from the bedroom to the hallway.
One of my tasks over the weekend was to cleanly cut the ceiling drywall, so that we could get rid of the loose stuff… and preserve the remaining drywall that I had secured with washers. Bob snapped a line for me as a guide, and I continued the work that Liz started on Saturday.
At the close of the day, I realized I had more work to do – and continued cleaning out the closet area (and filling in the gaps in the wall with foam). Though to my credit, I did decide to use gloves this time. He can be taught!
The laser level, helping point out where the joists are at. I was running low on batter, and just barely finished before this guy conked out.
Got another good house night in today, after work. With some serious cold temps coming soon, I wanted to get more insulation on the walls by the stairs (every little bit helps). The main challenge here is that a scaffold is required, to be able to reach the high angle of the ceiling, near the base of the stairs.
Put some time in after work, and threw in some Great Stuff foam along the stairway walls. I had to get the scaffold in place to reach everywhere, but I’ve found I’ve gotten much faster with the setup and breakdown of that guy.
When I saw this, I got really excited. It’s amazing to see the room in this state, as the walls have never been this insulated or this protected ever. I know we’ve still got more work to do, but this was really encouraging.
An old slide. I wonder if these things slipped down from upstairs, from behind the fireplace?
After this step, the next phase was cleaning up – which was a total pain. I had a few bags in the office that I had to haul downstairs. Then I had to clean and shop vac the second floor. Then clean and shop vac the stairs. Then clean and shop vac the first floor hall. Then clean and shop vac the dining room. And then finally clean the stairs down to the basement.
While I was able to get to some of the demo in our stairwell, there’s a good amount of plaster and lathe that’s difficult to reach – and requires a scaffold. Luckily for us, Bob has such a thing (we’re so fortunate to be able to tap Bob’s awesome arsenal of tools/machines/gadgets).
With all the street work and no-parking areas, it’s been critical for us to have the driveway available/open for Bob. And the thing with Bagster bags is that when you schedule a pickup day, they promise to remove it… within three days of that scheduled time.