Hey, we're painting!!!!!!!!

I can not believe we are getting as far along as we are!!! We have been painting the house for almost a week now. There's not much to see when you're painting primer and then all of the white and ceilings but now we get to the fun stuff! FINALLY! The fun stuff. Here we are testing out the colour of 2 of the walls in our new master suite!

It's going to look better with another coat!

The First Coat of Stucco

Talk about a mess. I thought the drywall hanging was bad, then comes the first coat of the stucco or the scratch coat. First comes the chicken wire that surrounds the house and then the huge pile of sand and the noisy machine that sprays the stuff onto the house. There's dirt and mud and filth everywhere. Gross. Lookin' better every day!

They say it gets worse, before it gets better!

Here comes the onslaught of the drywall! It is so filthy, you just have to give up and give in! Here's how we are living now.....Please excuse the dots on the photos but that's the drywall dust!

Good Times Good Times! The really good news is that we are getting closer to being able to move in!!! I can't believe it will only be a matter of a few weeks now and then we will be able to move up into our new bedroom....

Scaffolding arrives at the same time!

The scaffolding arrives almost at the same time as the drywall. This is for the stucco process. This part is just about killing us. I guess we hadn't planned on how much the stucco was going to cost and it was quite a shock, but we have to do it, so on we go! First they start by putting the chicken wire all around the house. I would say in about 2 days they are almost done! He's telling me he should be done today, maybe a few hours on Sunday but he doubts it. He is quick and we like that. Today there were about 10-12 people here at any given time. 4 drywallers, 2 guys setting up more scaffolding, 2 guys doing the chicken wire, our 2 workers, myself and Jack in and out, the dogs, it was mayhem, but it's still exciting!

Drywall is going up,

and it looks fantastic. We are really getting excited as the house finally starts to take shape and really look like a house with real rooms and some warmth. Now don't getme wrong, not like it's warm in there or anything, it's just a little warmer with some insulation and drywall. Here is the master bedroom, bathroom and the fireplace in the master with the cut out for the TV above it...

Sorry I'm not sure why some photos have dots on them and some not.

The Drywall Arrives!

Here comes the drywall! And a shitload of it as a matter of fact! 2-5 foot high stacks + 1 stack of greenboard for the bathrooms. But how exciting is this? The drywall starts to get installed on Thursday. Here comes the guy in his little tracker thingy and I'm thinking there's no way he's going to be able to get the drywall to the garage (they won't put it inside), but even with his saggy right eye, he was dead on. Maneuvering that thing like it was a toy!

HD/S:191

The Kids

Here are some cute shots I've taken of our kids over the past several weeks... Mac & T-Bone enjoying the sun together!

T-Bone hanging out at Tupac's house!

Whitney, sitting on top of MAc, with a bone in her mouth!

Insulation is going in!

We passed inspection today with flying colours. Our new inspector has turned out to be just great and we have been rolling along smoothing with him. We have now started the insulation and putting up a small amount of drywall (that was just to keep the job moving). Master Bedroom

The office and the media room

HD/S: 182

Look Ma, No Rain!

Finally things are moving forward and we have lasted nicely thru the last two bouts of rain! We had been holding up the project ourselves because we were not done with the electrical. We finally had to call in for some reinforcements (i.e. hired help!) to get the job done so we could move on. We got the job done and now we were waiting for the fireplaces to finish being installed. Then we also had another run in with another fireplace installer! That's two down and we started to panic slightly, because at this point, the only thing left for approval was the fireplaces and we had no one to install them! The other tidbit of information that made the situation worse is most fireplace people are so busy repairing fireplaces now, they don't even have time to do the installs, or worse yet, they don't even DO them in the winter because of all the repair work. Fuckin' Fantastic! It took a lot of hustle but we managed to find someone to install them and today we pass our inspection!!!!! We are now going to insulate, get approval for that on Monday and then Tuesday, they show up to start drywall! Shut up, I can't even believe I'm saying that! Really! At the same time they are going to start putting the chicken wire up outside and then they stucco. We are so excited that we are taking some HUGE steps forward. Master Fireplace: HD/S/WC: 180