Lots of Drywall (pictures only)

Big Week

What a difference one week can make! This past week was by far the busiest one the house has seen. Eric was working around the clock to get everything done before the drywall team came in...including pulling/hammering in thousands of nails left from the lathe and plaster, installing the microhood ventilation in the kitchen, building a sofit (sp?) around the kitchen, moving an electrical subpanel, moving some electrical switches, demolishing the plaster in the basement stairwell and installing the plumbing for a potential powder room in the future. Whew! In addition, the radiators were stripped, the insulation was packed into walls, and yesterday the drywall went up! No pictures of this yet though, sorry.

First up, we have the radiators. Before this week, I didn't think it was possible to fall in love with such things, but now I can honestly say I'm in love with our radiators--every one of them. I might have to assign them names. Randy refinished one radiator last week...including priming and painting with an antique bronze color that has a tint of green in it when a camera flash hits it. Gorgeous! Because the radiators were doused with many layers of paint, we had no idea they had so much detail on them.

The next picture is a shot of Griffen (with our contractor's potato chips) checking out the new insulation in his room.

Onward and Upward

Time is flying by! Progress on the house continues, but our contributions have slowed with the start of school, start of soccer, and fewer daylight hours to work with. Still, since the last time I wrote a new roof has gone on the house, more painting has been completed, the electrical and plumbing have been mostly completed. The plumbing was stalled when near the end of the installation, a new City inspector came in and rejected all the work that previous inspectors had signed off on! This cost us about a week, but our ever-calm and ever patient contractor has been doing his best to meet this new inspector's criteria.

After attempting to strip one of our eight radiators himself, Randy quickly sought out a backup plan for the restoration of these heating units. Now it looks like we'll be dragging the radiators up to Mukilteo where an industrial place that specializes in aerospace work will load the radiators on to a palette and then dump shot on them. Yes, shot as in tiny fragments of metal. We tested this process on one radiator and were thrilled with the results. Sandblasting was out of the question because this would have run us close to $6000. Instead, we should end up paying about $50-$200 per radiator, based on size.

We have ordered the fixtures for the main bathroom and we went to look at kitchen cabinets last weekend. We will likely go with IKEA's white Lidingo cabinets. I wasn't overly thrilled by this prospect, but the Consumer Reports and online reviews for the cabinets are very good, and they come with a 25-year warranty. We'll try to jazz up the kitchen with nicer hardware and fixtures and appliances.

With any luck, the insulation will go in this week and the drywall will begin next week. We're still hoping to be in the house by the end of October, but a lot will depend on how far we get with the bathroom, if we can have the new boiler installed by then, new exterior doors and broken windows repaired--a lot to accomplish in a 6-week timeframe.