Priming

Yesterday was a day filled with sanding and priming! And continued work on the siding.

And our new back door came! 

Leaning

Well, it turns out that not only are all of our old rooms in the house not square, but along with that, the whole house is leaning to the east by a good two inches already at the top of the addition...and who knows how many inches at the top of the house! On the east side, they were able to incorporate shakes even with the old shakes, but on the west side, they ran a vinyl buffer down from the edge of the addition roof to the bottom of the shakes.

Looking at the buffer from the addition side..notice it comes right up to the outer edge of it...

And looking at the buffer from the old side of the house.....and notice how much farther back the shakes are set against the vinyl...

And the garage siding is finished!

Ladders

I woke up this morning to the sound of painters setting up ladders underneath my window so they could start painting my corner of the house bright and early. Needless to say I scrambled out of bed to hang a makeshift curtain in the only window that didn't have one. Over the course of the day, the painters finished up the front of the house (complete with stairs and mailbox stand!) and the west wall (the one facing the apple tree), put another coat of mud inside the addition, and the construction workers made pretty good headway on the shakes on the garage!

Mud

Well, today was Day One of mudding the drywall. When I asked, our contractor told me that the painters will do three coats of "mud" before the walls are ready to paint. Which means they mud the third coat on Friday and will sand and be ready to paint next week. Let me translate: We need to pick out color schemes this week so they can paint it next week. Eek! We need all the help we can get! Ideas?

The also did more shingling on the garage and painted most of the front side of the house. 

Finished Walls

They finished sheetrocking the walls today! And also the paint guys did some more scraping and then painted one full side of the house and part of another! Pretty exciting!

Apparently the floor and ceilings in the kitchen weren't the only things that were not square. The basement doorway was too! 

There is a gap about one inch wide at the top of the door frame between the new board and the old one just to the right of it. 

The painters

Our one completely finished side!

Partially primed house front

Sheetrocking

On the menu for the day was sheetrocking the addition, some more plumbing work, and more siding work...painting a bajillion more shakes and nailing them to the house and garage very meticulously so they line up perfectly with the old shakes. Also, we (mom and me) learned last week that they no longer make the super wide cedar shakes that we have in some places on our house (~14+" wide?) because most of the cedar shakes now come from Japan and China and they don't have cedar trees that big evidently. So, to make the new shakes look more like the old ones, they are working super hard to match up grains in a few of the shakes here and there and nailing them down so they look like one large piece!

The white thing to the right is the pipe that brings heat upstairs in the wall between the kitchen and the dining room before the plumber took it out today

He then put in a new pipe that re-routes the heat so we can cut part of this wall out. In the end, this wall will look like the doorway between our dining room and living room, but a few inches wider. 

This is where the new pipe does another 90 degree turn to meet back up with the  register upstairs

This crazy yellow gizmo holds sheetrock in place so they can screw it into the ceiling!

The entire ceiling is done everywhere but the kitchen, and all of the walls are either completely done  or half done

The garage

Left side of the back of the house

From left to right: new color, primer, old/partially scraped paint