Hear yee, hear yee, we have walls

It is a strange and bizarre sight to be able to see THROUGH your walls. To see thee bones of your house..although, admittedly, very cool as well. It makes you realize there isn't much to a house. It makes you understand the structure and that is the first step in understand your house I believe. I'm not going to lie, the idea that there is space between your walls in which small critters and ants and spiders (over whom I am currently waging war. Our house has an unnatural draw to spiders apparently)freaks me out to no end. Again, I grew up in a log house. That means there is no space in between the outside wall and the inside, it's solid wood. It certainly brings to light the importance of good insulation I can tell you that much!

There's also something very misleading about walls. They go up and OH MY GOD you're done! right? Well that's what it looks like. The insulation went up on our after what seemed like forever and then MB and his family team (Dad and Bro) began to "hang dry wall". Again, this is a very new and bizarre experience for me. The walls go up and it seems like everything is done. Like you are well on your way to being finished. HOWEVER, there is a lot more that goes into this then just hanging them up and screwing them into the studs.

The joins need to be tapped. Then every single line of tape and every screw hole needs to be mudded. Apparently, there is another method where the entire wall is covered in plaster? Well that's not how we did it and I must say, our walls look phenomenal. You cannot see a single line or seam anywhere, more than I can say for the crappy job the previous owners did in the living room (grr). Well anyways apparently, this process is excessively time consuming. Only one corner can be done at a time. Then it is sanded, then mudded again, and then sanded again. This takes more time, esp with one man doing it in his spare time on three rooms and 4 closets (that is a LOT of corners for those of you who can count!). By the time I was soo done with remodeling I wanted to LIVE in my house!

I have yet to explain that while this entire thing was going on we, the two of us and three cats, were now living in essentially one room. We had the kitchen yes but everything was in one room and thank god for it. Our house has a good sized addition, sort of a three seasons room with lots of windows and separate, electric heat. Our bed, our small couch and half of our clothes were stuffed into this room. The vast majority of the rest of our stuff was in the basement. In fact, it still is. I'm still getting dressed in the basement daily. But the reality was that we had been over a month in one room while a good %85 of our livable space was being redone. This sucked. It sucked big time! I was getting claustrophobic to say the least. So when the walls went up I thought "Yes! this is it we are nearly there!" this sad idea lacks the truth that no, we were not nearly there. The FLOORS. we still had tar covering most of the floors even after MB's repeated work on the tar. I was getting disgruntled but there was still so much to do!

Hulk SMASH!!! The demo days

WE have a saying in our house (one of many). Our "baby" cat Finella who somehow thinks she is either a dog or a person, is the biggest brute and often goes crash around into things prompting us to use the term "Finny SMASH!" Well, during the month of April I think the term changed to "Lindsey SMASH!", "MB SMASH!".

The original plans to simply re-do the entire master bedroom, changed to, "well if this room, why not the other spare bedroom?" And "if that room? Why not all THREE bedrooms?!" One of the gloriously horrifying discoveries we, and apparently "dude" (what we like to use to refer to the previous 2 yr owner who seemed to have lost all steam about 2 days in would be my guess?) made was that the ORIGINAL owners...never primed the drywall before sticking up layers upon layers of wallpaper. Now, having grown up in a wall paperless log home I didn't quite grasp the gravity of the situation until MB's mother found out and I watch a look of veritable horror cross her face. As MB later explained, there would be no real way to remove the old, peeling wallpaper without destroying the wall. Great. Lovely. Such wonder, smart people those previous owners were.

When we originally looked at the house, 'dude' had apparently made an attempt to remove the wallpaper in the master bedroom and failed miserably. He had gouged the walls. This, plus MB's overwhelming desire to re-do thing the correct way and re-insulate, lead to the original plan of "master bedroom over hall". It was to my great delight, as I began the panicking decent in realization that there was near nothing I was going to be able to do about the walls in the other bedrooms, that I was informed that all of the bedrooms would be demoed and re done.

I got to the house one day (We lived in our apartment for a month after we bought the house before moving in. Something that saved us and our sanity I do believe), to find I could see strait through from my living room, into our master bedroom. You see, not only are all three bedrooms teeny tiny, but the closets? Hah! They are just comical. Another amazing MB foresight in this project, was to take the closet space in the living room (coat closet is my guess?), wall it off in there and GAIN another closet in the bedroom! This coming from the fact that MB knows there was no way I was sharing a tiny closet with him. I couldn't believe the change! It was kind of fun walking strait through one room into the other.

The weekend of Easter found MB breaking down and handing a flat bar over to me. I had instinctively KNOWN demolition would be fun as hell. I smashed, I ripped and crashed into things and kicked them! It was AWESOMEEE!!!! We spend Easter morning demoing the back bedroom and got so into it, I never had a chance to shower. We showed up to Easter dinner with me picking rubble out of my hair.

Demo was a joy. I mean, you get to destroy things! Even a 2 year old understands the sheer delight of demo. So much changes so quickly and you feel like your really making progress. However....once demo is over, you realize your house is no longer really "houseish", it's more 'construction zoneish". The progress for here is slow and by this point...we moved in. The idea that things would be done before we moved in had Long since been plowed over. Now, we lived inside our construction zone. Greatttt.