A Week of Work

Matt took a week of vacation time to work on the house. It was an intense week.

Saturday

We started with a trip to Menards, this time for a trailerful of insulation and plywood (hidden underneath in this photo!). Matt met with our drywall contractor to discuss the drywall job changes since they had first talked about it back in April.

A friend from church came and helped put in blocking. Blocking is just a fancy word for boards to be used as anchor points for drywall.

Saturday focused on plumbing, some electrical, and odd miscellaneous.

Finally! Someone is asking me to use my hammer!

Sunday

We did actually take a break.

Monday

I started the day by taking a trip to Menards for supplies while the guys started rolling on electrical and plumbing.

What is a trip to Menards without walking through the more fun aisles?

I got asked four times if I needed help while I was there, so I suppose I looked a little lost…or…something.

Did you know you can get basic fixtures and then add your own glass? I think this one is cute.

Maybe it was the 6 ten-foot PEX pipes I was struggling to keep on my cart?

Note the neatly organized tools. It’s a constant battle, folks.

The kids helped with cleaning and go-fering, and lots of odd jobs.

Kitchen sink rough-in; vent pipe going up through the wall.

Matt finished plumbing in for the kitchen and the half-bath.

Half-bath rough-in. Toilet will go to the left, sink to the right.

That vent pipe in the previous photo had to be run all the way to the top of the second story and out the roof, with a special roof cap installed over it to prevent rain leaking in around the exit point.

The guys joined forces on wiring receptacles once Matt was done with the plumbing. The old-work receptacles in the upstairs walls weren’t fun, as we didn’t renovate those walls.

Enjoy the rare occasion of a photo of me, ha! I’m measuring for outlets in the kitchen, sporting my very own brand-new tool belt. Matt is so much, um, less in circumference than I am that when he needed to use his own tool belt (that I’d been borrowing), the sash would be way too big.

Tuesday

I took a morning trip to Menards, for another roll of electrical wire and various other supplies.

I may or may not have picked up some flooring and counter samples while I was there.

When I got back, I worked on planning out lights and switches, leaving cryptic confusing messages on blue masking tape in the approximate light switch locations.

It wasn’t until the guys started wiring the light circuits that I realized that I had referred to some circuits by multiple names. Oops!

Matt asked the kids and me to prep the mudroom for electrical by demolishing 16 inches up on the mudroom wall–the last remaining untouched wall in the downstairs. Then I started putting in receptacle boxes on that wall…

Do you detect a theme here? The kids certainly do…

but then we realized we were going to run out of a different kind of wire and a certain kind of electrical box, so I ran to Menards…again.

The guys ran a couple exterior receptacles at the same time as the rest of the house. That’s going to be SO nice!

In the evening, after taking a kid to a dentist appointment, I dropped by ACE Hardware for a brown dryer vent cap. Because apparently Menards doesn’t carry brown? Go figure.

Wednesday

We needed yet another roll of yet another kind of electrical wire, so Wednesday began with (haha! you guessed it!) a trip to Menards, while the guys got to work.

Matt is cutting insulation to place around the silver duct next to the chimney. This is rock wool, which is a fire barrier.

Matt and I finished all the pre-drywall HVAC. Matt had started the A/C up the previous weekend and we had been disappointed with the results of the (expensive) HVAC guy who had worked on it. So Matt tweaked a couple things and we were much happier with the airflow to the upstairs after that.

The big orange wire is run for the dryer.

We worked on electrical nonstop after that.

Matt had to brush up on how to wire a couple of the more complicated circuits.

And then a big storm came.

And it turns out every window in our house leaks around the bottom.

The dark drips are leaks from the upstairs window.

(Except, of course, the new ones that Matt installed on the east side.)

Such a rotten feeling, seeing water come into the exposed walls, knowing that if the walls were covered up the water would still be coming in, just invisibly so.

I was afraid that this new, awful discovery would derail the progress we had made, and expand our project horribly once again, but Matt disagreed.

The dark patch on the wall and floor is water from the storm.

“No,” he said. “We’ll mark the places where the leaks are, and I’ll caulk around the windows on the outside, and we’ll put rock wool on the inside instead of fiberglass insulation since rock wool doesn’t absorb water as much. It’ll be okay.

“And when we can, we will renovate the exterior walls like we did with the east wall. Every old window’s days are numbered.”

Sigh…sometimes it feels like it never ends with this place.

[to be continued]