Drywall Hanging

My pictures and posts are lagging vs. the current status of the house. So I'll post the pictures that I have from two weeks ago.

To start off, here is the vent cap that we bought online for the basement range hood. Looks pretty good, don't you think?






There's really not much to narrate about what has happened in the last two weeks since my last post, since it has mostly been drywall work. The Drywaller's worked on and off during the weekend, and it took about four days total to get all of the drywall hung. One thing that you will notice is that we do not have a ceiling. And we chose to live with the industrial look of having the ceiling exposed. We debated long and hard about making this decision because there are several pros and cons about what we chose. You basically have a choice of either a drywall ceiling, which definitely looks nicer and is cheaper compared with a suspended grid of ceiling tiles. The disadvantage of a drywall ceiling is that it is more of a permanent thing. And with having the main floor unfinished, we know we need access to the joist bays for utilities. But the problem with a suspended ceiling is that you loose headroom, since it is a dropped ceiling (and we love out 9 ft tall rooms) so we were not willing to compromise on that. The other issue was cost: basically a suspended ceiling is more expensive than drywall, but not only that, the electrician told us that rough in for the upstairs would be much higher if we have a suspended ceiling since they have to work around it. So taking all of those things into consideration, and the fact that we simply didn't have the budget to do all of the upstairs utilities at this time, we decided to go with the very unusual way of going without any ceilings at all. And since we do want drywall ceilings eventually, that was something else that merited attention.
Basically the top 6 inches or so of our drywall walls will not have texture or paint, for the simple reason that when they do come back to put in a drywall ceiling, he needs the bare drywall so that the mud job looks nice and as if we started with a drywall ceiling right off the bat.

But I am on a quest for creative ways to disguise our open ceiling while we live here with a tiny almost non-exitent budget to accomplish that. (Free stuff is going to be the key here) So we'll see what I can come up with.

 Here Evan is very excited about his bedroom actually getting some walls in. You can seen that it didn't take long for things to get very messy. But Evan loved playing in all of that white dust. His wooden train made many pitstops around the rooms.

Here's a view of my laundry closet in the Hobby/Guest Bedroom.

 And here, they are working on the bedrooms. To me it seemed like a waste to put a 12' sheet of drywall up, only to cut out the window and throw away that piece. But as Jose explain it, most drywallers will use three pieces above and three pieces below. The problem is more joints that need to be finished, which would make the taping quote higher, and the other is that the joint at the window corner will crack. This way is better. You do end up wasting some drywall, but they were really good about re-using as many pieces as they could in other spots.

 Here you can see the cubby by the fireplace without any sheetrock. Wait until I get a picture of the finished thing. Looks amazing.

 This one shows the family room in progress. Coming along quite nicely.

 A view down the hallway towards the Office, which will actually be Bianca's bedroom while we live down here.

 The view of the drywall above the shower. The Bathroom and the Storm Shelter room were the only two rooms which will actually have a drywall ceiling. The reason is that both of these rooms needed insulation in the ceiling, and it needed to be contained. But you can get a glimpse of what the future holds for the rest of the basement. (If we can save up the money, I'm hoping that this will be in Phase III of our project).

 Here's a view of the bathroom where the sink cabinets will be located. Because budget is really tight right now, we're looking for creative ways to save money where we can, and live with some things for a while until we can upgrade.
When my in-laws came to visit a week ago, we took a trip down to the Habitat for Humanity Re-Store in Des Moines. It's like the Goodwill of construction materials.
We did find a nice 8 ft oak double sink vanity for $250 (A brand new double sink vanity top alone starts at $750)
To say it was a bargain was an understatement. However, there was no way we could get an 8ft one piece monster to turn the corner down the hall. So we had to pass it up.
Also, the electrician finally came up with the bill, and it is a couple of grand more than we were expecting! So there goes the budget for a lot of things. So we had to make some choices about the things that we need to get to moved in, and what will have to wait until we can save up the money again.

This next picture is a rough stage view of where the toilet will go. We did go to Lowe's and picked up a toilet this past weekend, so it's on the queue of things to install in the next couple of weeks. Very exciting indeed.

 Here's a shot of the Shelter, or the Vault as the drywaller's call it. Wait till I get a chance to take some pictures of the finished thing. What a difference.

And here you can see Juan as he very carefully works around the trickiest wall. It was very important that they not hit any pipe or wire and you can see there was a lot of them in this one wall alone!


They finished hanging all of the drywall on a Friday, and Juan and Jose spent the rest of day laying paper down to cover all of the floors to keep the drywall mud from making an even bigger mess. Then the finishing crew came in on Saturday to place the first coat of mud and tape all of the seams. On Tuesday they came back to sand it all down and to put a second coat of mud. On Thursday they returned to sand it all smooth, then on Friday Jose came back to throw the texture on the walls.
We went with what they call Orange peel, which is supposed to be the texture of the outside of an orange. Very neat.

Jose still has to finish the mechanical room and the fireplace before he is done, but he will do those on days he doesn't have other jobs.
In the meantime, we have begun to prime the walls! We'll start off getting the safe room painted and dry so we can move some of the things that we need to store long term, like the window screens for upstairs and floor registers that we already have, and hings like paint, caulk, etc that can't be outside to freeze in the garage. So we went to Menards this past weekend to take advantage of a 25% off sale on light fixtures (talk about God's timing again) and bought 10 gallons of primer, and an exterior door that we will use to close off the basement at the base of the stairs.


So tonight Shawn began to frame the door because our radiant floor system is actually in operation and we need to keep the heat in. That's right! You're eyes are not deceiving you! WE HAVE HEAT! Praise goes to the Lord, for he has led us to this point! I couldn't be any happier about how the whole thing turned out.
It felt weird not having anything to do while the drywaller's were at work (ok, we had plenty that we could have been doing, but we took a break). Eventually we couldn't stand it any longer, specially when the temps dipped into the low 30's at night. With a slab full of pipes full of water, that's a scary thought, not to mention that our pluming is operational and the pipes are full of water as well. So we made the low voltage electrical connections for the the pump, the system relay controller, all of the zone valves, and wired the thermostats. We set the thermostats and went to bed. The next morning we went to check, the outside temperature was 45ºF, and our basement was nice and toasty at 60º. I can definitely now believe why they claim that radiant heat is a much more "comfortable" heat in which you can have a lower temp. set on the thermostat and still feel cozy. Our floors got up to 70ºF. and it was like walking on a nice heated pad. Nice! I'm so going to be spoiled by this.

The other thing that Shawn has done since the last post, is that he once again rolled out the insulation on the main floor so we can keep our heat in the basement. I'll need to take some pictures again. In the walkway we didn't want to leave it just the subfloor since it will let heat out, so we settled with recycling a pile of scraps of blue foam that we had leftover from two years ago when the slab was poured. Talk about being green!

As soon as we're done painting the storm shelter, we'll move onto the bathroom so that Shawn can get the toilet in, and do something about a sink. But basically as soon as we're done painting, the electrician can come back and do the trim out to install all of the switches, outlets, and light fixtures. It's getting to be an exciting time!
It always seems like every year we're in some sort of crunch to beat the snow. This year, we're on the clock to beat the weather from freezing that garden hose that is supplying water to the old house from the new house!
I so hope we can be moved in before that happens! Even if it means the basement won't be as finished as we'd like.
But who cares! We have heat! I can't wait to say bye-bye to our whole house space heater and move into the luxury of radiant heat!

Until next time.

Drywall is on its way!

I had forgotten about the latino drama. :)
So last Sunday no one showed up to work, except Jose. And then he kept leaving and coming back because of personal issues. Jose did get the Office started, and we got our first look of how our windows will look when finished.
All of the hard work making those bucks so things would come out right paid off. It's one thing to picture something in your head, and quite another to see the actual thing. We're very happy and excited that the windows will look as good in real life as they did in our dreams! Check it out:

Monday, Juan was supposed to come in and hang sheetrock, but no-one showed up again. When I called Jose, he said that they would all come back today.

That worked out all right since we still didn't have the family room/lounge area ready for them anyway. So during the week, Shawn worked on getting the range hood mounted, and the duct for it installed.

You can see here the box he made that will get covered with drywall and the range hood mounted and ready for electricity hook up.

You can also see that we cleared out all of the junk and tools we had in here. We moved them upstairs for now, but we need to clear them out again and actually organize them, since the upstairs will get covered with insulation again as last year.

We also ran some speaker wire so that it runs behind the drywall for our family room entertainment system. And did other miscellaneous things we needed before drywall. Here you can see the lounge area sans mess.

Today, Shawn began to organize the garage so we can move some stuff in there. We plan on storing the siding trim boards inside since the tarp keeps blowing off , and we don't need them to get wet. We will probably also begin to organize tools and things out in the garage so we can actually find things when we need them.

Also, Jose and two out of his three workers showed up today, and they are in the process of sheetrocking the place. They are making good progress, but Jose had to leave for some reason, and I'm not sure that two guys can get the whole place done. We'll see.

Hopefully I'll be able to post again in a week, and show some good pictures of walls!

Until then, God Bless.

Getting Ready For Drywall!

Since my last post, Shawn got the Manabloc manifold mounted on the wall in the mechanical room. Also, my in-laws returned during a Saturday to help us out some more. With Derald's help, Shawn got some framing drilled and mounted next to the water manifold to route that mess of pipes that were our supply lines. Not messy any more! Check this out: That black thing you see in the middle is the water manifold. Our water system is called home-run in which basically every single fixture in the house gets its own pipe.

Shawn also hooked up two separate smaller copper manifolds, as you can see here, that handle the pipes to the toilets, outdoor hose bibs and drinking water faucets. All of these lines get supplied with hard water before the water supply goes through the water softener. The drinking ones will eventually be filetered/treated before they leave for the bar and kitchen. Once water goes through the softener, it is then routed to the manabloc into the bottom where it goes through all of the cold water ports then it leaves at the top to go to the water heater. The hot returns to a different port at the top again from the water heater and leaves for the fixtures through the hot water ports.

But now Shawn has made all of the connections to it. It looks very sharp. And the best part? Water is turned on and no leaks! Makes me think of a heart, with the red arteries and blue veins.





This picture here shows the connections for the water heater.
Once he was done with the water supply, Shawn ran a permanent soft water line to the radiant system.

Another great thing to happen is that we filled the radiant pipes with water, and we are leak free! So we are ready to get the floor fired up. We were waiting on the electrical inspection, and we got word last Friday that we passed the electrical inspection! So with that part behind us, it was time to order the rim joist spray foam. We got two quotes, and one came in half as much as the other one and $100 less than our budget! So praise the Lord for that because we were thinking that we'd only have enough to do the rim joist and not the basement windows.

Here is a picture of the contractor as he worked on filling the rim joist with foam. This is good insulation, since most heat load calculations do show that an obscene amount of heat is lost through this area. But the main point is to stop air infiltration leaks. Keep cold air from coming in, and warm air from getting out.
I meant to take more pictures, but by the time I got done with Bianca and her bottle and got her to nap, they guys were done.
They did the whole perimeter of the house in about 2 hrs on a Sunday afternoon.

This picture here shows a little bit of both parts of the work. The rim joist above, and the perimeter around the windows below.



After the spray foam guys left, we began working on our punch list to get the drywall done. We had gone to Menards on Friday and bought all of the drywall as well as the tubs of mud and tape that we need. Then the next thing we tackled was access panels and caulking. Shawn built the framing the we need for the access panels to the remote manifolds for the radiant system as well as for the bathtub plumbing and the back hose bib that are in the walls. Because of budget, we're only going to drywall the walls now, and also since the main floor is not going to be finished for a couple of years, the electrician will still need access to the ceiling in the basement. So the ceiling access panels for some of the plumbing up there will be done then. But this picture shows two of the four access panels. The top is for behind the tub, and the one below is to reach the remote manifold located within the fireplace. We'll still not sure how we will finish these, but for now, the drywaller will butt his drywall to the 1/2" plywood, and we'll dress them up with some trim later.

While Shawn worked on that, I started caulking the joint between the slab and the exterior walls. This is mainly for radon mitigation to make sure that the pipe we have that uses the stack effect takes the radon out. Also, because of HVAC equipment, sometimes the inside of the house can get depressurized. (It's the reason why sometimes when you go to some office buildings, you can barely open the door and when you do, a whoosh of air follows you). If the negative pressure inside the house is strong enough, it can actually suck radon into the basement through cracks. Which it is why it's important that if you ever notice cracks in your basement slab (or slab on grade), you seal them. Or if you have a crawl space, the EPA recomends somehow sealing the the dirt to keep radon from entering the home. But this isn't a radon mitigation site, so I'll get off my soapbox. Though as a final note, if you don't think radon is worth the trouble, just look up it's health effects, and that it doesn't take much to reach the "acceptable" levels in the home.

Anyway, I got as much caulking as I could, then when the kids woke up, Shawn took over. So this picture shows what he's up to.
We spoke with the drywall contractor last week, and told him that the materials were ordered and we were waiting to have them delivered. He informed us that he had taken a job out in South Dakota, and it would take him two weeks, so we agreed for him to come on Saturday October 9th to begin. This was good because our to-do list to be drywall ready kept getting bigger every day. There are a lot of things we need to have done right. Once behind drywall, it's won't be easy to fix!

Shawn began working on the framing to mount the range hood and the kitchen vent pipe, and of course, the range hood we buy takes a 7" pipe, not the standard 6", so no one has the wall cap we need for the outside. So we had to wait for it to arrive. We stumbled upon DrillSpot.com, and bought the cap from them since they were cheaper than ordering through lowes, plus free shipping. We placed the order on Thursday afternoon, and it was here by Friday! And did I mention that was with free shipping? That made us really happy since we did not have to wait long to keep working. This picture shows the end product of that.

While Shawn did that, I began to scrape foam off the window framing, and filling up the electrical chases in the exterior wall with foam and miscellaneous things.

But Shawn had looked into the ten day forecast, and the 9th there might be a chance of rain. Well, drywall and rain don't mix, so we called Jose and asked if he would be around this Saturday to deliver the drywall. He said no, he was still in SD, so we said OK. If it rains, we'll just deliver it some other day. This was Thursday. Friday evening Jose calls and says he wants to start this Saturday, so can we deliver the drywall? Well, with the chance of rain for next weekend and the fact that we're into October already, we decided to go for it. Since he wasn't supposed to work until next week, we thought we had plenty of time to work through our to-do list since we're stressed out enough as it is. Not to mention that if you have seen the background on some of our pictures, we had piles of tools, parts, materials, etc. etc. all over the place that we needed to move so there was room to store the drywall, and for the crew to work. We now had less than 24 hrs to get the house ready for drywall!

And the four of us went to work. Evan helped Shawn take all of the lumber, siding, scaffolding, and such and load it onto the trailer, and haul it to the barn. We also had to take all the toys and baby items back to the old house. We had to empty the storm shelter and take out the piles of insulation that we had in there, and find a place for the windows screens that we've been storing there. I helped moving tools around since I had Bianca on a carrier. We had to tell Jose that we probably wouldn't be ready to have the whole basement drywalled, but that we'd try to get as much as we could. And Menards wouldn't deliver until noon or so.

This morning it was an early rise for us so we could do what we hadn't been able to finish last night, since what we managed to do was clear up the house and move stuff around and out of the basement. Plus, Shawn needed to go to Lowe's to buy the insulation that we needed for the bathroom and mechanical room. We weren't able to finish everything, but we have all rooms ready for drywall with the exception of the family room, kitchen/bar and lounge/dining room done.

Shawn got some layers of blue foam under the stairs for insulation, since we plan on closing the stairwell off, and on the upper side of the stairs, the Iowa winter will be looking for a way in. He also got our data wiring coming into the closet under the stairs tidied up a bit. The second pipe you see if for future wires needed for the upstairs someday.

Menards truck didn't show up until about two, and by the time the four man crew got done moving the drywall inside the house, Jose had to leave for another job. Also, Menards did not deliver all of the items we ordered since they were short at the store, so Shawn went back to Lowe's to get them because he thought Jose would need them.
Supposedly Jose will work tomorrow, and he claims he will have all of the drywall with the exception of the family room, lounge, bar area hung!
Can't wait! I can also really not believe that we're actually going to have drywall on our walls! That will really change the look of the whole place!

I'll leave you with some pictures of the basement after today.

This one here shows where all of the stuff from the other rooms ended up for lack of time. We'll work on this tomorrow (Sunday), and we'll see how far we get because if Jose comes, we really don't want to be in his way. We did agree that if we're not ready in these rooms for him to work, then he can come back next weekend to finish hanging. But I hope we can get done that few things we still have left. Basically we need to do the kitchen vent, scrape the foam flush with the face of the walls, run some speaker wires for the family room, and do some plywood backing for the display cubbies in the fireplace. We probably will also start clearing out the garage and moving tools out to the garage and barn, since I'm sure things will get messy when they texture. Plus it's good Feng Shui, no?

This next picture shows the family room, where we are storing all of the drywall.

And look, even our storm shelter is ready to go!

I'll try to get another post on Friday. Hopefully by then we'll all be seeing white everywhere!

Until next time, God Bless...

Pipes and Framing

This should have been last Friday's post. I'm running a bit behind on my posting, but here it is at last.
The major work of the past couple of weeks has been water lines and framing.
Three weekends ago our neighbors the Brewer's helped us on Saturday morning. Valerie watched Evan and Bianca at their place while Derek came over and helped Shawn with framing a bulkhead around the plumbing along the family room as you can see in this first picture.

While Derek worked on the framing, Shawn and I began pulling the hot and cold water lines for the entire house. Even the lines for the upstairs bathrooms and kitchen, though those pipes will not get hooked on. As you can see in this picture, we ran enough pipe to reach the fixtures above. But what we'll do is we'll coil the pipes you see hanging down inside the joist bays. In a few years when we're ready to move on to the upstairs, will stub them out where they need to go.

During labor day weekend, my in-laws came down again to help us out. The guys spent all day Saturday and Sunday framing the bulkheads around the duct work in what we call Evan's Room and the Back Bedroom. We need all of the framing to be done so that the drywaller can come around and frame the walls. Pam helped me clean and catch up on laundry. She also gave the broom a good workout in the new house and cleaned up the mess from the electrician and Shawn drilling holes everywhere, and from when we ran the chases in the foam for electrical. There was quite a mess down there, but she did a great job of straightening it all out.

On Labor Day, Shawn's dad helped us to finish pulling all of the water lines for the house while grandma watched the tykes. With the three of us our work went fast. The next few pictures show a couple of examples of the pipes as they weave their way back to the mechanical room.

This one here is running along the bulkhead in the family room and it has all of the pipes for the kitchen and laundry room upstairs.






This one shows all of the pipes from the east side of the house as they enter the mechanical room.








This one has all of the pipes for the whole house in the mechanical room.













And here is where they all culminate where eventually there will be a manifold handling all of those pipes.

You can see the bottom part of the wall has a sheet of tile backer board. Shawn can't cover the top half yet because there is some electrical wire that we can't cover until the electrical inspection has been done. The electrician got done today, so hopefully they pulled the inspection permit today and we can expect the inspector to come out within 48 hrs. It will be nice if Shawn can get going on the water manifold.

So last weekend Shawn worked on getting the bath, kitchen and laundry all stubbed out and ready for drywall. So here you can see the bathroom sinks stubbed out. We still need to strap the pipes to the wall, but that should not take too long.

The next pictures show our shower/tub controls and nipple for shower head all done! Yes, as soon as we have water flowing we can take showers if we wanted.























This picture here shows our laundry room connections ready to go:















Here is the kitchennette stubbed out. That wall got quite a butchering will all of the water lines, electric lines and drain pipes that needed to go there. But after it gets covered with drywall, no one will notice.


The other interesting thing that happened lately is that our well pump quit on us. Being submerged in that last flood wasn't good for it, and even after spending all day taking it apart to fix it, we couldn't get it to work. Bathing out of buckets and living like pioneers got old after three days. So Shawn hooked up a pipe to the rural water supply in the new house and ran it to the outside water hydrant. We're pumping water backwards into it to get to the old house. So far that seems to be working out all right. But this is yet another reason why we need to be out of the old house before that pipe freezes when it starts getting too cold!

We had a meeting Sunday with a guy to come and spray foam the rim joist and the windows in the basement, and we're meeting a second contractor on Thursday for a second quote. We expect that probably next week we'll award the contract to one of them and they can get going. As soon as the electrical inspection is done, and that rim joist is foamed, our drywaller, Jose, can get started. Can't wait!

Until next time.

Still working...

Here are a few pictures that I am missing from previous posts.

The smaller panel on the left is the new second panel for our second service that will handle the HVAC. It has its own meter box at the pole so that we can receive the discounted rate for having electric heat during the winter, and A/C during the summer. We will also be running the ventilation system from this panel.

A couple of weekends ago we ran all of the data wiring for telephone/internet/cable. These are the orange boxes that we got for low voltage wiring. They are basically more for a “professional” look since they are not really necessary. But I insisted that we do it right anyway.
You can see Bianca sleeping on the job in the background. Seems like the sound of pounding hammers and drilling puts her to sleep.

We decided to make the closet under the stairs our media place where hopefully all of the electronics for the house will be stored (music, networking, home theatre stuff, etc).


So this picture shows all of the wiring coming in.
And this is just for the basement, and when I took this picture we were not done, so there are about double that or maybe even triple of that quantity of wire. Still need all of the wiring for upstairs, but not going to run those at this time. I would love to have a whole house audio system, but not in the budget right now. Since we do not plan to finish the basement ceiling, I am hoping that someday in the future we can fish the wire for that. We probably should look into running at least speaker wire to the family room where we would like the surround sound. I better add that to the list of things to look into before drywall.

And look at this: we have now a dryer vent! Yay! I really like how it is not very big and does not really stick out like a sore thumb (at least not any more than the two disconnects nearby). Shawn had to drill about 13 I-joists to get the duct out, so it was a bit labor intensive. You can see in this picture that he had to go over at an angle to avoid one of the A/C ducts, and so he would not come out of the wall too close to the electrical boxes. You can also see in this picture the temp lights that the electrician installed for us to have light. These will stay on until after drywall.

I’d like to build some stands to raise our front load washer and dryer up a bit from the floor. Once we figure out at what height we want the box, Shawn can finish the dyer duct so that the elbow comes out of the wall at the right height.

Shawn also mounted the box for the bathroom fan/light and ran the duct for the exhaust to the outside.





This is what the vent looks like out the back.
The materials arrived for the water lines this week, so Shawn has begun to pull the water lines to the bathroom. He got two of the cold water lines to the bathroom, and hopefully tomorrow I can help him do more. The pex pipe that we’re using is a bit hard to pull through bends and such, since you pull it almost like electrical wire, in one long continuous pipe from the mechanical room all the way to the fixture. So we’ll see how much we can accomplish this weekend. Our friends from our small group have offered to help with babysitting, so we’ll see if we can find someone to watch the pikes in the morning.
The electrician wasn’t able to come to our house this week, but he hopes to be finished next week. If all goes well, we are also hoping to be done running the water lines by next weekend. I’ll have to post pictures of the pex pipes. Maybe we will be able to fill up the radiant system and do a test run and see how things work.
That’s it for now.

I'll leave you with a picture of Bianca in her walker in the new house, already invading Evan's room!