There are nearly no words to describe how excited I am (I say nearly because there are in fact words because hello, this is me, and I will find words for everything).
This is what happened.
Todd left at the end of April for another round of touring in Europe (see ya Todder!), while the rest of us got to work with insulation. In our minds, we thought sheetrock would be in by the time Todd arrived home at the end of May, but in reality everything between sheetrock and the end of May gulped up more time than seemed necessary. That is to say, insulation took a long time. But then again, hasn't everything we've done up to this point taken forreeeevveerrr?
In science, they call this the "rate limiting step." That means the total measurable rate of chemical reaction (or overall time it takes to build a house) is largely dependent on this one slice of pie if you will, and that is a fact I can largely attest to. Everything up to here was largely dependent upon a single thing happening before it, i.e. framing lead to plumbing, lead to electrical, lead to a trillion other random tasks that couldn't be finished until another project was or at least until Dad was free to start again.
And in the end? Those tasks collectively became "the work behind the walls," six months of tedious and tireless work quickly covered and forgotten.
[An aside: My mother described the process like childbirth: once you see the beautiful child you made you forget how much awful work it took to get there and end up making that crazy mistake again. Hmm...Who was the second child in this family...?]
But now? It's game on because instead of waiting on Dad's work, we're free to busy about like little ants, and now almost everything we do will be visible and...dare I say fun...? Yeah, I won't go that far. But - just like in a chemical reaction where the final step to end product that you might actually see is in fact not usually the reaction's rate limiting step - the final steps are the most pronounced.
And now, the moment you've all been waiting for....pictures!
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| For most of the walls we used snow-like spray insulation. First we hung netting by stapling it to the framing and then we used a giant machine to blow insulation into the walls. |
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| Only one of us was NOT made terribly itchy by the insulation. |
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| For the ceilings, we used the old pink stuff to fill in. |
Being inside the house during insulation was not unlike being trapped inside a giant, pink stuffed animal.
You know, one thing I didn't mention about sheetrock is that we didn't do it. Uh huh. Pick your jaw up off the floor. When we started the house, we knew that the one thing we hoped to outsource was the sheetrock and luckily we were able to budget for labor.
So without further ado, I present:
THE TRANSFORMATION (Oooo Ahhh)
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| Looking in from the kitchen. Taking out the walls in this area totally opened the floorplan of our house without taking away any of the historic design from the entryway rooms. |
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| Check out that tray ceiling in the kitchen! LOVE how that turned out. |
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| The formal living room at the front of the house. |
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| Looking from the formal living room to the back of the house. |
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| Back to front: kitchen to the left, music room, stairs, den, and formal dining on the right. |
Yeah, it's pretty stinking amazing. Next up: painting like crazy. Stay tuned...
