Stuck-Oh

It's been a busy few weeks, unfortunately, not on the house. But we have gotten some major things completed; most notably - stucco!

Since I last sent an update we now have our house stuccoed! It was a two day process that started a few weeks ago. The stucco guys arrived on a Thursday morning and went right to work. Two guys working most of the day stuccoed the house by hand just troweling it on. They would push the stucco on with a trowel working it behind the stucco wire. Then after a little bit they would come back and scratch grooves in the stucco for the future second coat to bond to.

A week and a half later they came back to do the second and final coat of stucco. Nowadays there are usually three coats of stucco with the final coat being a color and texture coat. Our stucco guy said that our house, built in 1952, was a standard two coat job and he could match it best with two coats. For the second coat they followed much the same procedure to trowel on the stucco, but they spent much more time getting it smooth and looking nice. To match the texture they used a wet wallpaper brush that they brushed the surface of the stucco with. This left the larger grains of sand standing proud of the surface as it washed away the finer sand and cement leaving a rough, even texture that matched the rest of our house.

While that was being done, we made some progress ourselves, though nothing that looks as cool. We have gotten some more drywall up in the master bedroom. Most of the bedroom walls are now covered. And we are gradually jacking up the house on the footing that we poured a few weeks ago.

The big job we got completed is relocating the tankless water heater to the attic. This was a huge job since it involved running a new gas line to the attic, running new plumbing lines to the attic, re-working some of the existing plumbing under the house and disconnecting and capping the now unused gas and water lines that previously fed the water heater and the old kitchen range. Fortunately I had a helper for some special "daddy and Railey time". Surprisingly, Railey loved working under the house and didn't want to come out despite the dirt and spiders that we saw.

Anyway, the water heater needed to be moved since the previous location will be in our future dining room and the water lines were run inside a wall that needs to come out. Basically, a ton of work to free up a small space on the wall.

The next steps will be to do some soundproofing in the bedroom walls, finish putting up the drywall in the bedroom, get a post under the low spot in the floor that we are currently jacking up and build the hallway wall.