Drywall stage 1: complete

The drywalling of the outside walls has been finished. The walls are sanded, and ready for primer and paint. They did a nice job on the windows.

This wall will be getting primer tomorrow. It is in the garage, and power equipment and the battery box will go along this wall. So it needs to be painted before that can be done.

The drywall was cut to fit as close to the steel as they could get it, but there are still places where I have to put in caulk and foam to seal it up from the rest of the house, for fire safety. I started that last night. I am glad I was wearing rubber gloves! I will need to finish that tomorrow before I start with the primer. I was going to finish it tonight and start priming, but my batteries are coming tomorrow and I wanted to have some things on hand before they arrived, and the shopping took longer than I expected. Hopefully I will have pictures of the batteries tomorrow evening to share, and hopefully no dramatic story to go with the pictures.

The grass I planted has been growing quite well. There are still some areas that are not coming along very quickly, and may need more seed yet, but overall, I am very pleased.

The roof has done very well.

 On the 24th, the south slope beside the garage was like this.

Here it is on the 27th, with quite a bit more grass showing.

While grass seems to grow just fine in my lawn, I have much more interesting plants that seem to keep visiting. With moving out to property that is rural, I was expecting to see or find evidence of a lot of animals. I also am not expecting or desiring to have the sort of lawn Chem Lawn will get you (despite the appearance of my roof). I was expecting to have to deal with some plants such as poison ivy. I was not expecting the who's who of dangerous plants to come live beside my house. As you may recall, I had the interesting, lovely, and very tall poison hemlock. Now I have this lovely and interesting looking plant showing up.

It has lovely flowers, and an interesting seed pod. It is Datura stramonium, and some of the other names it is called, are as colorful as the plant and its flowers. This is in the same family as the potato and tomato. However, this plant should not be eaten. It can produce hallucinations, delirium, or even death. I am waiting for the ninja to show up to buy ingredients for poisons to tip their weapons!

Off to bed, I think tomorrow is going to be a long day.

Field of Weeds

Well, with drywall being worked on while I am not there, there aren't too many pictures to show. There are a number of things that can't really proceed while the drywall is being finished. But we are working on what we can. Late last week, I started trying to clear some of the weeds, so we will be able to work on the vent house, and the solar array.

 Before

 After

Mulched

I wanted to keep the plants killed off under where the array is going to be, and I had a bunch of cardboard from boxes that materials and equipment have come in. So, we laid the cardboard out under the aluminum supports. That should minimize what comes up before I get the array installed.

Sunday dad and I looked around the outside of the house to decide where it made sense to get more grass growing. I still had seed from the first batch I bought, so I thought I may as well get it going. As we checked on the area around the house, we saw deer tracks on the east side. We followed them, and they proceeded up onto the roof.

Not the best picture, but the dark spots are where the hooves pushed down through the straw and into the soil.

The drywall work is coming along. It looks like they have two coats on, and I am hoping they can put the third on tomorrow. The windows are looking good.

I am hoping that before the end of the week they will have the last coat on.

Next week the batteries should show up for the power system. I will have 12 batteries each weighing 119 pounds!

Exteme underground drywalling!

Yesterday, the adventures in hanging the drywall commenced. Rick showed up by himself. So he couldn't start with the garage like I had hoped. He started back in the office, and worked his way around the outside walls throughout the day. He found the ICF easy to attach the drywall to. Then he got to the wall in the family room running parallel to the joists, and had his first fun. He found that he had to remove over spray from the foam that had been applied to the roof. The joist was pretty much in the way of doing this.

Then he realized he was going to have to wait on this wall, until some of the drywall that was on the floor, was out of the way. Oh well, on to the kitchen.

All the drywall up, above and below the plywood support for the cabinets.

Then Rick started to work on fitting drywall to the curves at the top of the windows. He found that things did not line up vary evenly with the window frame, and that getting the drywall to look good around the window was going to take some work.

I went to lunch, and when I got back, I found that I had lost a window, and had a more Hobbit sized entrance.

Thats not funny, give me back my window and full door!

Rick has seen the light, and works on opening the window.

Now what about my door? I'm short, but not that short.

That's better. The windows are now looking more finished.

He also cut open the drywall covering the door :-)

Now today, Rick had an assistant, Jeff. Jeff didn't know what he was in for. The boards in the garage, were 12 feet long to start with, and two of the walls got type X which is also thicker than the standard drywall. Those sheets are much heavier than a 4 by 8 standard sheet. To top it off, because of certain framing/plumbing/electrical fire safety issues, we were putting up two layers of the type X on those walls. To add a real fun twist, I had put 2 inches of foam insulation on those walls so they didn't have a good sense of where the studs were, and they had to use 4 inch drywall screws. Neither one of them had ever used 4 inch drywall screws! But wait there's more....the type X had to go all the way up to the steel decking. So they also had to carve the top to come pretty close to matching the profile of the ridges in the decking on one wall, and get around the joists sticking down on the other. Oh and they got to deal with two different slopes they had to accommodate. One from the floor sloping toward the garage entrance, and the other from the roof sloping perpendicular to the floor slope. Did I mention getting the drywall cut around the steel angle that runs perpendicular to the joists to stiffen them?

In the morning, they started from the bottom on the first layer, and found how much fun it was going to be to run the 4 inch screws.

 They notched the boards to go around the joist work.

After they had gotten pretty far along on the first layer we broke for lunch. I had an errand to take care of and when I got back, I found they were well into the second layer. They had learned some things on the first layer, and the results were looking pretty good. The screws were also less trouble on the second layer since they didn't go into the studs as far.

Jeff had to leave, so I helped Rick move some boards around and he worked on the third wall.

When we left for the day, the wall was mostly covered.

Tomorrow the tape and mud will start to be applied to the seams and the screws. Dependent upon how things go, they may have the first coat on all the walls tomorrow. From talking to Rick, I may be able to start with primer and paint early next week.

BD's house of drywall

Friday I did sign up for insurance with a company that was willing to insure my house.

Friday also started the drywalling saga. First up, I went and got the drywall compound, and the corner pieces, and tape for the job.

Those got put in the house, then I went to sign for my insurance. In the afternoon the drywall was to be delivered.

Mid afternoon, I got a call that they were finishing loading the truck and they wanted to confirm the address. They showed up with a pretty good sized truck. They pulled it up out in front of the house, where it was pretty solid, and used the boom to get the panels from there, to the front door.

They slid them from the boom, onto a cart. Then once they had them on the cart, they wheeled them to the family room and an area in the dining room where they would not be in the way of getting them put up.

8 and 9 foot long sheets.

After they unloaded those, then they went around to the garage, and unloaded the big boards.

12 foot long sheets! These are big and heavy!!

On Saturday mom, dad, and I went out to do a number of things. As dad and I got into the dining room to start planning the day, we saw a deer right out the front window in my woods.

We did quite a few things. We changed the oil in the generator. We tried out some concrete patch on a place in the garage that I wanted to get filled in before the drywall was put up. Dad did a pretty good job filling in this spot.

We also put up a strip of plywood in the kitchen to provide a good place to anchor the wall cabinets to. I was concerned with whether we would be able to get screws put into the studs in the foam, after the drywall was up, so we decided to put up the strip of plywood so that we would have a good large target to fasten into.

Dad did some more work on the plumbing, and I put up more of the baseboard supports.

Today, all we really did, was get things organized and arranged so the drywall crew will have room to work on the outside walls. I did get some photos of how the grass is doing. The roof in particular is doing nicely.

Tomorrow they start installing drywall at 7:30. This is going to be a long day I think.

Green stuff, and the mouse trap

I found a style of cabinets that Lowe's has started carrying in stock that has the look I have been wanting. So although I can't get all the features I was hoping for by going with the in stock cabinets, I can get a look I wanted, at a much lower price and without having to deal with the long time between ordering and having semi-custom cabinets delivered. Then I spotted that Lowe's was running a special on the in stock cabinets. 20% off through Labor day. Mom helped me decide on my cabinet layout in one afternoon, and I went and bought my cabinets. Last Thursday night we hauled the cabinets to my storage unit. Pictures will have to wait till we install them.

The grass has started to grow on the areas beside the retaining walls. I decided that I needed to get more water on the roof, and that I needed some straw to help the roof retain the water and to help get the grass going. To be able to deliver more water to the roof at one time, I did two things. I bought two oscillating sprinklers to see if I could get better coverage on the roof. I also needed a larger holding tank that I could put a lot more water in at one time. For the tank, I didn't want to spend a lot of money, since this would be a temporary thing. I had the walk boards laying around, and a spare tarp. So Friday night, we made a small pond and put a large battery on the well pump and let it run overnight.

Saturday morning, we got out to the house, and I had a 4 legged mouse trap come check us out.

Then I checked on my pond...

Almost full. I had a reflecting pond :-)

Melissa, David and Erin came out to check out the build progress. Erin decided that she would help with construction. She retrieved building materials, and proceeded to very deliberately place them on the panels laying in the dining room.

Now for the straw. I checked at two places that I knew had straw for sale, but they were both closed on Saturday. They were predicting rain for Sunday, and I wanted to have the straw up there before I gave it a large watering, or we got rain. Talking to my neighbors, they let me know of a farmer nearby that had lots of straw for sale. It was also at a better price than the two places that I had priced it at previously. I took the truck and dad's trailer which had hauled the kitchen cabinets a couple evenings before, and went and got some straw.

Dad and I spread about half of what I bought on the roof, and then put a tarp over the rest, which we just left in the trailer.

There were still some plants that had not been pulled, trampled, cut or otherwise killed when we put the soil on top. So they are still poking up through the straw, but not much in the way of grass as of this point.

I watered the roof that evening, and put a few hundred gallons of water up there. Then Sunday it rained. We worked on stuff that needed to be taken care of at my parents house.

Labor day, we labored. It was somewhat messy. Sunday there was about 3/4 of an inch of rain that fell. I got some pictures of the grass that was starting to show through the straw beside the retaining walls.

Yay, the gold is turning green!

We spent most of the day putting panels up in the utility room. The room is now fully paneled, and ready for me to paint the walls and floor, before I put equipment in.

By the end of this week, I am supposed to have all my drywall delivered. I am also supposed to go from my construction loan to a permanent loan (even though the house isn't done). However, that may get delayed since I have been having trouble finding an insurance company that will insure my house. Two that wouldn't even consider covering an earth sheltered house, and the last one objected that my house was not visible from the neighbor's house or the road. There are a lot of very private houses in this area, I think that last one was making some sort of excuse for not covering my house.