Drywall is Up!

I wrote this last week, but wasn't able to get it out until now. Therefore, "last week" = "two weeks ago".

As you can see from last weeks pictures, we were able to get most of the drywall finished up last weekend. All that was left was patching all the gaps in the ceiling that were left when we tore out the interior kitchen walls.

It sounds easy, but it was miserable! It was really hot last week so our house was about 88 degrees when we were working in the evenings. We had to cut the ceiling openings straight so we could easily hang drywall in the openings. While cutting the openings there was insulation and drywall dust constantly falling down and sticking anywhere that was sweaty, which was everywhere. But we got it done and there's no more plastic covering the holes in the ceiling!

This past weekend was focused more on getting some other things taken care of around the house. The priority was getting rid of a huge trash heap in the backyard that had piled up from all the demolition. My grandpa came over with his truck and both of our parents were here to help. By lunch time we had made one run to a house recycling place to recycle the old doors and windows and three runs to the dump. I'd say we took about 9 cubic yards of trash to the dump, and that's after pulling out anything that we could burn in our fireplace this winter! It is so nice to have that huge pile gone from the backyard!

We also had a garage sale on Saturday to get rid of some other clutter. Stacie and her mom did a great job enticing hesitant buyers to take that thing that they really don't need home with them anyway. Anything that didn't get sold was listed on Craigslist or left by the street with a "Free" sign. All that is still left is the old dishwasher and crib.

The afternoon was spent splitting wood (the oak tree that we cut down in the first post over a year ago when we started the project) and assembling our new BBQ (a Christmas present that has been waiting for an opportunity to get out of its box). We didn't quite get all the wood split because we had a failure with the hydraulic valve. It blew an o-ring; which we found severed when we took the valve apart. After a trip to the hardware store for some new parts, we started it up again. A few minutes later we severed the new o-ring. Something was definitely not working right so we called it quits on the wood splitting.

On Monday my grandpa came back over with the schematic of the valve. After some more analysis, we were able to determine that a few parts had deformed allowing the o-ring to be severed. We fabricated a spacer to to keep the warn parts from hitting each other and causing the o-ring to fail. We fired up the splitter again and it hasn't failed since.