We were working on all floors, today. I was upstairs in the guest room, removing the remaiing lath from the ceiling. Liz was on the first floor, cleaning up more of all her hardware. And Bob was in the basement, wiring up more of our lights.
Came back to the house, suited up, and got to work up on the second floor. My main goal: demo the ceiling in the guest room, and clear out some of the old electrical that’s still up in the attic.
Went down to the basement, and saw Liz and pulled out all (and I mean all the house hardware she’s hunted down and located, over the years). She was doing an inventory of everything, and figuring out what to keep, what to clean, etc.
Bob was over today, helping us improve the electrical situation in the basement. While we’ve had the basement lights working in a temporary manner, we’re slowly getting them wired up more officially.
Nice.
Bob was over today, with some additional materials. We’ve got plans to repair the back porch (and replace the sections I demo-ed a few days ago).
With the wall clear, there were a few more things we had to do before adding drywall. First up: installing some wood header pieces, inside the joist spaces, so that the drywall had something to grab onto. And we also wanted to add some soundproof insulation to the walls (a future plan for this space down here is to convert it into a bathroom).
It’s really quite amazing to see how bright things look, and how many details really stand out now. Quite the transformation.
Tonight, we walked through the instructions together, and fine-tuned the depth of the nailer. After a few practice nails on some scrap lumber, she was ready to go all-in.
Today, Liz and I decided to focus our efforts on clearing up some room in the basement. While we’ve been working a lot on installing drywall in the second floor hallway, our main goal has really been to use up the existing materials we have stored (and scattered) around the house.
Quite the transformation from when we first saw it.
Mentioning it here because an issue like this might have derailed us for a significant time, a year or so ago. But on encountering it, we evaluated the situation, made a few measurements, did a cut, and proceeded along with the install.
Big day for us today, continuing our work in the hallway with the (very heavy) soundproof drywall. We made good progress a few days ago, and were looking to continuing working with the material today. The big challenge: getting it lifted up another 4′.
The thing of this is: I’d only ever tried installing this with Bob. The drywall is thick (5/8″), comprised of two pieces glued together. And the kicker? The thing is heavy. Like heav-y.
Back when I was helping Bob install this in the master bedroom, I struggled a lot just moving boards around. And had trouble lifting up the boards onto horses.
Adding in the insulation to the lower half. Mostly an easy process, but one thing to note about the soundproof insulation: it doesn’t separate/split well. This was a bit of a challenge, when trying to install it around conduit and outlets.
If you futz too much with it, the insulation tends to crumble like week-old cake.