Weekend Projects

The post title should really read, Weekend and Late Monday Night Projects but that doesn't sound as good.

We had a lot of little projects to tackle around the house last weekend to get everything ready for drywall.

Here's what our To Do List looked like:
-Screw and spray foam all the exterior doors
-Spray foam around the windows
-Apply acoustical sealant to any joints in the exterior walls that were too small to insulate
-Lay the fancy shmancy subfloor in the family room
-Fix the stairs going down to the family room
-Build the wall for the family room closet
-The build-out for the fireplace in the family room
-Clean the house (move a bunch of tools, garbage, plumbing fixtures, etc.)
-Get started on yard cleanup

Some of these are small jobs like all the spray foam and acoustical sealant. They don't take much time but are important in creating a thermal break for the house. I don't have any pictures of these, The spray foam you can't really see and the acoustical sealant looks like we rubbed tar on the walls. Not very pretty.

The subfloor took way longer than we thought it would. The floor is 2' x 2' panels that are a tongue and groove assembly, so that you can just hammer them into each other. The actual assembly was easy but levelling the floor out was tedious and we had to keep going back and ripping out panels that we had already laid. We are only done about 3/4 done the floor, we need to leave part of it open so that we can do some concrete color samples for the basement. I'll have more about that later on this week or next week.

Laying the subfloor panels

When The Husband first starting building the stairs he miscalculated the rise on the top stair on the first set he built. The flooring extends all the way to the stairs and over the first riser so you have to account for the thickness of the flooring in the height of your first riser. The Husband somehow accounted for the flooring twice. Anyways, to fix this we thought that we were going to have to completely re-build them. Once The Husband took the stairs off he figured out that he could repair the existing stairs with a few modifications. Yay for time and material savings!

The stair repair

It's been so long since we built interior walls, I think I forgot how long they actually take to build. I thought that building the closet wall and putting it up would take half as long as it actually did. The fireplace build out wasn't too bad, except that we still needed to decide how we wanted to do it. We like leaving things to the last minute around here. This may have taken us longer than we thought but they are done! The only framing that we have left is the interior walls in the basement. It will probably be a couple of weeks before we can go ahead with those though.

Closet wall framed

We got the house all cleaned up and we got a good start on the yard cleanup. There is construction garbage everywhere. We got a few loads cleaned up and I got started on cleaning out the trees. Our acreage used to be a farmyard (maybe 50? years ago) The guy that used to live here had his shack house more in the trees and the area where we built our house was where he kept all his animals. We find some interesting things in the trees. Antique seeders and cultivators, old doors, wheels, fences, etc. We are trying to get this all cleaned up and get rid of some of the dead trees in the yard. We started on cleaning this up last fall and still have a ways to go but I got one little section mostly all cleaned out.

Not bad for a weekend's (plus a Monday night's) work!