We have walls!

This could rightly be called the Week of the Wallboard. We have done little since the beginning of the Labor Day weekend but put up insulation and hang wallboard, go to work, and snatch random moments to do necessary laundry and dishes and meals. And drink GALLONS of water. And shower morning and evening on some days. Trust me, you don't want to sleep covered in sweat and chalk dust.

Okay, before you can put up walls, you have to put everything in the walls that makes everything work, like electrical wiring, plumbing, and air conditioning ductwork. There are elves who do this for a living. You go to work in the morning. When you come home that evening, all this stuff has been stapled to studs and run over the rafters. And lots of little blue boxes sprout from the framing in strange places.

They even do showers stalls.

It is no fair that the crane to deliver the air conditioner came just as I had to go to work. I didn't get to watch!

How many men does it take to place an air conditioning unit? 5 - one for each side of the unit and one to drive the crane to place it on the roof.

After all the wall's insides are in place, it has to be inspected. Then we got to put up the insulation. This was last Saturday, Sep 5. Dad and Matt stapled insulation.

Then we took a break to properly celebrate Labor Day. Since we couldn't go to the wash, we did the next best thing and brought the wash to our backyard. Steak, dutch oven potatoes and dutch oven biscuits! Yummy!

Charcoal doesn't smell as good as juniper but it works just fine on the ovens.

Labor Day came and we really did. Our home teachers, Mark and Michael Smith came to help and spent the day with us putting up the ceiling. It took us all.

By the end of Monday, most of the ceiling was up.

We finished the rest of the ceiling Monday and then worked on the walls all week. We'd take an hour in the morning at 5:30 when it was light and then pick up again at 5:30 in the evening. Some nights we got a 2 - 3 hours in, some nights just 1-2. Yesterday, Sep 12, we worked from 7 to 6 and are almost finished. We need some studs in one corner to finish up.

Matt got to play the drills and dremel (wonderful, magical tool that lets you cut around the little blue boxes and other openings after the board is on the wall.). He got quite proficient at the whole lift and drill routine. Did you know there is a neat foot tool that you slide under the bottom edge of the wallboard and then you step on it and it pushes the board up and into place?

Bedroom

Bathroom

Kangaroo Matt! Note the pouches that are useful for holding screws, steel tape, exacto knife, pencil, chalk line, and the occasional drill. Be careful! If you touch him, you will be covered in a cloud of chalk dust.

This is after 10 hours as the drywall crew.

Dry wall by the numbers

1 thunderstorm that showed us there were still leaks in the roof before the drywall went up.

2 different drills needed to properly do the job

3 steel tapes. They would congregate in odd places and then get moved back to where they would be useful.

1 dremel. See above comment. Rusty's had a neat attachment that kept the bit at the correct height while you drove it around the boxes. Or wrote out your name in Chinese in a chunk of wallboard.

1 arrow used to push fiber insulation behind the shower walls. Dad spent most of Friday evening and Saturday morning doing this.

upteen kazillion square feet of wall board hung.