drywallin'

some more pics of the drywalling that happened over the past few days, and our friend gary. i took a few days off from work to work with gary, and we listened to a ton of music while working. lots of conversation about bands, music styles, faith, new york, friends, life, love, and drywall.
thanks, gary! you are one of a kind.

insulation, gary, progress!

so we did some soundproofing by insulating some of the walls before drywalling them, then we commenced hanging drywall like crazy. the amazing gary arrived with his smile and drywall tools from seattle, and brought tons of good energy and laughter to the house for the past week. he slept on a futon in the middle of this mess, and covered his bed with a plastic dropcloth during the day to keep it clean, that's how freakin' cool gary is.

the picture at the bottom is of gary wondering why he got himself into this mess in the first place...

building new things, finally.

so, we finally made it to the point where we aren't just tearing our house apart and stirring up plaster dust. new walls! it felt good to be building again, and to watch our plan take shape. this was part of a big push over the past two weeks, in which we got a TON done, compared to the progress we've made lately. my good friend gary was coming in for a visit from the northwest, and had agreed to do some drywall, so we were frantically trying to get some walls ready for him to work on. long days of working, lots of home depot runs, and plenty of christmas music (including aimee mann, blind boys of alabama, amy grant, over the rhine, sufjan stevens, and much, much, much more).

o' dusty christmas tree, reminder of normalcy...

photo courtesy lowell brown.

a fisher kind of christmas...

working on the floor.

here's the fun we had a few weeks ago, working on the subfloor under the new bathroom. each time we took up a layer, we'd find more problems. this is probably (hopefully) the worst corner/floor in the house, due to past water damage and roaches and general nastiness. we tried to clean it up as much as possible, reinforce everything, and lay fresh flooring.

cinder block wall extravaganza!

so, there was a portion of our back yard fence that was a couple of pieces of plywood nailed together. rotten plywood. it fell down a couple of weeks ago, and after a half-hearted attempt at trying to prop it back up, thabo tore the rest of it out (and threw his back out). we decided to cinder block the gap, since the rest of the wall is cinder block.

so, cindy and i googled 'how to lay cinder block,' and two days later, this is what we got. it's a wall, it's not straight, but it's better than rotten wood. i like to think it has character.

he came from outer space...

more work on the brick wall.

last week (i think?) we did this work to that brick wall from the earlier post. we had to patch a big chunk of it that had been badly patched previously, because the bricks were literally falling out of the wall.

cindy and i bought bricks and mortar and mortar dye, and tried our hand at laying brick and regrouting the wall. it went pretty well, all things told. a lot of work, though. thabo spent an afternoon scrubbing the wall down with a cleanser, and it's looking pretty good.

these are the people we live with.

exposing a brick wall in the kitchen.

this past saturday, we cleaned out what was melissa and thabo's office/closet, and started the process of converting it to the kitchen. first things first, we dug into the plaster in front of the chimney, in the hopes that it was in good enough shape to expose it. it was....basically. you can see from the pics that at one point the center of the chimney was torn up and then badly patched. but, we think we can make it look pretty nice by the time we're done. as i write this, thabo is working on chiseling out the mortar and cement that we didn't finish up. he told me his wrists are pretty sore... next step is to clean off the brick as much as possible, then regrout, then seal the whole thing so it doesn't rain dirt on the kitchen counter. onward!

wash your face!

so, here's what cindy looks like after tearing down the hallway ceiling. at least she's still smiling...

happy halloween!

my precioussss....

cindy found these treasures behind the hall paneling we pulled down. that dollar bill must have shrunk from being in the wall for so many years. or else it's just because people were smaller back then (clinically proven fact).

anybody know if a leon roberts from 1976 is worth any money?

taking down ugly hall paneling.

demolition time...a wall is gone.

in the duplex apartment, on the bottom floor, the space is separated by a couple of walls, a closet, and a small hallway area. all of that is gone now, and our kitchen looks kind of like an unfinished hunting cabin at the moment. lots of plaster dust and trash bags full of debris. the bottom picture is melissa smiling through the pain of stepping on a nail.