Drywall and Door

We got drywall! Lots of it. We got the delivery in mid October. It was a bit overwhelming- it seemed we hardly had space to put it all!


They had to use a huge crane to move it...



... and then we had drywall piled in the living room...



... and in the master bedroom!


The guys who hung the drywall did an amazing job. Here's the master bedroom:


And the pantry before...


... and after!


Abby's bedroom:


In order to reach all the stairwell stuff, they had to do some rather crazy things. In this next picture, way up at the top, you can just see a guy balancing on a beam...

Sam got the downstairs bathroom ready for drywall...


It looks bigger with the drywall in!



... and the stairwell started looking pretty impressive!






Then we got hit by the fires. Sam's family was evacuated from their house in Escondido, so Abby and Anne came to stay with us. Since there was drywall stacked everywhere, we had to put an extra mattress in the garage! Luckily, their house was safe. The fires made for some amazing sunsets, though.


There were a lot of drywall pieces and drywall dust. I should've counted how many trash bags we filled. It was enough to fill the bed of Sam's truck! And how absurd- in San Diego county if you want to recycle drywall and construction materials, they charge you something ridiculous! So we didn't. But we both felt bad about it.


Then, Halloween came. Sam spent Halloween dressed as... a carpenter! He worked on installing our new front door. Here it is in the garage, ready for shaping...


Sam removed the old door, making life very difficult for our trick-or-treaters: we didn't have a door for them to knock on!


Naturally the door frame wasn't plumb or square, so Sam had to figure out how to configure the new door to fit with the wonky frame. He said at the beginning of this project that door-hanging was like the holy grail of carpentry, and predicted that he'd be pretty pleased with himself if he pulled it off.


Fitting the hinges...


Placing shims on the floor to keep the door level...


Chiseling the door frame...

Chiseling the door!


Testing...


Checking...


Admiring!


Of course, it is perfect!! Sam was pleased with himself. :) Oh, but we still needed a handle. And a lock. I don't have pictures, but at around 11.30 pm, those were in, too!


the next day, the drywallers came back and finished the living room.




All in all, we're pretty happy with how things are going! And the space under the stairwell makes a great fort!


These days, we've had some guys over doing the mudding of the drywall, and then we'll be ready to paint! But first, a much deserved vacation for Sam: we're headed to Baja for five days, and hope to get some good surfing in. More updates when we get back!

Plaster and Pasta

Things have been quiet here on the blog, but around the house, not so much. Sam the plasterer has finished everything but the color coat on the remainder of the house. Now it needs to cure for another week, and then he'll put the color on!




Meanwhile, "my" Sam hired a bunch of guys to come and put the insulation up in the whole house. They did it in a day, and now the inside looks like a cloud!

The stairwell... (I love those windows!)


the bedroom...


the cupola.


It's remarkable how having the insulation in changes how sound travels in the house. It is almost eerily quiet in there!

Over the past week, Sam has also hung a bunch of doors. He's really good at this. We both are very pleased with the aesthetics of the natural birch. I have to figure out how to varnish it so we don't lose the natural look. I especially like how these two doors downstairs kind of 'match'.


And this door leads from the master bathroom into the closet.


Of course, Sam needs a lot of energy to do everything that he does... so I try to feed him well. Recently, I've been on a home-made pasta kick. With a hand-cranked machine, it's actually remarkably easy! And thanks to my mother-in-law, I have one of those machines. The first time I did it, I documented my progress. I started with flour and eggs...


... rolled it through the pasta machine a zillion times...


... used the other side of the machine to cut it, and then laid it out on the table to dry! (I've since found out that you can skip this step.)


The result? A happy, fettucine-Bolognese-fed Sam!

How many turtles do you need to make a herd?

We found a tortoise in early September. He was pretty cool, just wandering around the neighborhood. We kept an eye on him for a couple of hours. I researched him on the 'net, and we were ready to adopt him (if Sam can build a people-house, we figured he could build a tortoise-house)... but then it turned out that he had escaped from one of our neighbors down the street, so we returned Mr. T to his home. But it was fun while it lasted!


The roofer has torn up all of the old roof (see picture below) and has put up new roofing paper (no picture, sorry!). We're going to be putting a cool corrugated galvanized steel roof on the slanted part, but that has to wait until the plastering is done....


... and we can't do the plastering until all the windows are installed! We finally got the window frames for the stairwell (they were air-freighted... the glass is coming by ship), so Sam installed those.


The two-stack...




And the four-stack!




In a way it's nice that the glass is being shipped separately, because it made the frames a lot lighter and easier to install! But we do have a bit of a fly problem...

We also had a bit of a window surplus. Between the windows that we'd removed and the (wrong) windows that we'd been shipped, we had a lot of windows! Luckily, we also have a spacious garage in which to store them. Then Sam managed to sell most of them on Craigslist, and he's used a few in the remodel he's doing at our friend Michelle's house.



As long as he was on a window roll, though, Sam decided to remove the (kinda old and ugly) window from the living room and replace it with one of our (surplus, new, pretty) awning windows...


We both feel like this fits in a lot better with the rest of the room.


But then there was just one old window left, in the office. Hmmmm, we can't let that happen, can we?


Nope!


In other news: plumbing. Sam plumbed all of the master bathroom. This is the bathtub...


...these are some crazy pipes up in the ceiling...


... and this is for one of the two sinks. We're also going to have double shower-heads in the master shower, but somehow I don't have any pictures of that... yet!


Also, on September 7th, Sam and I celebrated our fourth anniversary! We went to see Chicago, which neither of us loved, but that's ok because we love each other! :)