A New Home for the Dunn Family: Day 198 - Drywall, Doors & Avoiding Disaster

Lots of trucks must mean progress!

Drywall news

Random thought: Have you ever noticed how drywall has a millions different names? Drywall, sheetrock, plasterboard, wallboard, etc. Fact of the day: According to Wikipedia (It's my blog, and I can site Wikipedia if I want to!), drywall is called gib board in New Zealand. It's short for Gibraltar board.

It news a bit closer to home, our drywall installation is progressing nicely. P.J. has finished hanging all of the drywall. Mike and his crew are now taping, mudding, sanding & priming everything. They have been working hard and should have things finished by 2/27.

Drywall is definitely NOT a clean job!

Stilts are just plain cool.

A Near Miss

Today we narrowly avoided a major problem with the thermostat. In all of my infinite wisdom, I told the electrician to put the thermostat in the busiest place in the entire house, a wall along the main staircase. When I realized this, I started seeing images of Harry and Linus tearing down the stairs & ripping the thermostat off the wall every other week. Needless to say, I decided to have the thermostat moved to a less dangerous location behind the broom closet door. Unfortunately, all of the sheetrock had already been taped & mudded. When I told Mike that we needed to move the thermostat, he was not very happy with me. We both began having visions of needing to tear down the sheetrock in the basement ceiling, putting Mike waaay behind schedule & causing me to go even more over budget. Fortunately, my electrician is awesome!!! I called Brian, and he simply says "No problem." He drove out to the house later that day (from Pierz!), pulled the wiring back into the mechanical room and fished it back up through the wall without disrupting a single sheet of drywall! I can't even begin to express how happy I was. Brian has simply been an amazing electrician to work with.

Garage Doors

The garage doors were installed today!!! Never mind the fact that the horizontal tracks haven't been installed yet, so the doors don't actually open. Details, details. The doors were installed without a moment to spare. Gered is planning to deliver the first load of cabinets to the house next Monday. Our appliances were initially also scheduled to arrive any day. I ordered then during a Black Friday sale back in November. In a very weird role reversal, we have been finding creative ways to stall delivery of the appliances as long as possible because we have no place to put them! I think the freight company, J.B. Hunt, is getting a bit tired of holding our stuff!

Anyway here are some pics of the garage doors:

FYI - Emily waded through 4ft high snow drifts to take this picture. She almost didn't make it back alive!

Before

After

Exterior close-up

Siding News

Tom, Travis & Al spent the day getting the Tyvek Stuccowrap put on the house. Stuccowrap is very similar to regular Tyvek except that it has crinkles in it almost like a corrugated tin roof. It is designed to allow moisture to drain better than regular Tyvek. This was very important to me because I want to protect the OSB panels from moisture damage as much as possible. According to Tom, Stuccowrap is a bit more difficult to install compared to regular Tyvek because it stretches due to the crinkles.