Insulation and Drywall, Oh My!

Hello from Jupiter, FL! I'm on a much needed vacation/spring break down in Florida watching the Cardinals play some spring training games.  So far my friend Caitlin and I have been to two games and have seen the Cardinals win both!


While I've been enjoying the time down here, back home in St. Louis the house is coming along really well.  We got insulation last week and are getting drywall now.  It's funny, we've been without walls for so long that it was almost more difficult to distinguish what the photos were of now than they were before.


Here are the photos as of 3.20.12.  I'm sure there are more now, but let's not overwhelm you too much.

The dining room hasn't been completely done yet, but it looks like this was the main cutting area.

Mom keeping track of ALL that drywall.

Seriously, that's a lot of drywall! 

This is the insulation in the family room/back room.

Insulation on the stairs

DRYWALL!! This is the master bedroom, the doorway on the far left is the master bath and the doorway that Mom is standing in is the living room.

The kitchen side of the back room before the drywall went up.

Remember that picture I just showed of the kitchen just with insulation? Well this is the after!

Needless to say, as great as vacation is, I'm pretty excited to get back home and see all the changes in person.

Recent Happenings

Only six days since the last post.  Are you impressed?  There still hasn't been too much happening, but that is about to change pretty rapidly, hence this blog post. I think by the end of the week, we will be starting in on insulation and then comes the drywall.  WE'RE GOING TO HAVE WALLS!!!  Like I said in the last post, there have been little things going on that are kind of hard to show in pictures, but here are a few that are a little easier.


I'm leaving a week from today (happy dance!) for spring break in Florida, so I don't know that there will be any posts after this one for a while.  Unless this week is really productive at the house, which is likely, given that it is currently 82 degrees without a cloud in the sky!


We'll start with some wiring/electricity photos:

All the light boxes.

Lots of wires going to the electric box!

The kitchen wall on the west side of the house.  You can see the electric boxes, and can kind of see the wires.  It's a little difficult since they're yellow on wood.

The workers strung up lights in the back room, it looks so pretty!

ALL the wires for the kitchen.  It's kind of a spiderweb of wires right now.

The house did not have overhead lighting in the front room originally, we figured we may as well add some while we're at it.  There will now be six can lights in the front room.

Some of the electricity in my room.  Over this past weekend, Mom and Dad pulled down the rest of the wallpaper.  Bye-bye brown and white!

This is taken from the landing going up to the second floor.  Again, lots of wires.

All the kitchen wires again.

Brian's room and the landing at the top of the stairs.  We clearly kept the electrician busy!

And a little bit of plumbing:

I'm trying to get my bearings with this picture.  I believe it is the plumbing for the upstairs bathroom.

And on that note:

The new bathtub! We were going to keep the original bathtub for the house, but then we found out it would keep just as much to get it resealed as it would to buy a whole new tub.  So new tub it is!

Lastly, and probably most exciting, we're starting to get siding!  Like I said in the last post, we can't get too far on it because of the door fiasco, but still.  It's starting to look like a real house:

The second floor has siding.  It might be kind of hard to tell, since it is white.

Taking off some of the remaining siding from the garage.

The full back of the house.

Like I said, there probably won't be another post until after spring break, unless there are a lot of updates this week.

Wreaths

Well, well, well.  I had no idea it had been so long since the last time I posted.  There really haven't been all that many updates.  The roof on the garage is done. Other than that, a lot of the stuff that has been done lately is wiring for electricity and stuff that would be pretty boring to show you pictures of.  


We would probably be further along, but we had a little set back with the back doors.  First, when they were delivered there was a big dent in one of the doors.  Pella recognized that it was their mistake and ordered a replacement.  That's where the trouble really started.  They ordered the wrong side of the door.  Remember, these are two sliding doors each of which are about 8 feet tall - meaning it was a custom order.  Well when we realized that they sent us the wrong door, Mom had to call Pella and reorder the door again.  As you can imagine, this situation was a little frustrating, because the door had to be reordered, we can't start on drywall, flooring, or siding.  They're kind of big parts of the project to work on, and kind of lead to THE WHOLE rest of the house being finished.  Evidently, the sales man at Pella did not learn as the rest of us did, that the customer is always right.  When my Mom (righfully) called to complain, the guy working at Pella was for lack of a better, appropriate word: RUDE.  He was kind of indignant and overly reluctant to 1. offer an apology 2. show that Pella cared at all about our pretty substantial business.  Long story short, we reluctantly got a little bit of money back.  Any money back is awesome, but in the grand scheme of things based on how much the door cost, and how much we spent with Pella in general, it really wasn't much to show any appreciation of our business.  Honestly, if I were ordering windows again, Pella wouldn't be high on my list after how rude this one man was.  Obviously one person can't ruin an entire company, but as someone who works in retail, I would NEVER treat a customer that poorly.

Anyways, moving on from that little venting session, since I don't have many pictures of the house to post (thanks again, Pella) here are some pictures from Christmas.  For Christmas this year, Jessica and I made Mom new wreaths for the new front door.  We got most of our inspiration from Pinterest.  I think I've talked about Pinterest before, but just in case I haven't, Pinterest is kind of like an online inspiration board where you can organize pictures from all over the internet in one place.  It has been super helpful in getting ideas for the new house.  Here are the pictures of all the wreaths.

I think Mom was a little confused about all the presents she had to open.

January.

February.  The whole wreath is wrapped in yarn, Jess and I both did one like this.  It took FOREVER!

March.  This was the other yarn wrapped one.  It's hard to see in the picture, but it has a big "V" on it.

April.

May.  The mini-bunting says "Welcome"

June.  Playing Cards.

July.  Black and Blue felt and ribbon w/pin wheels.

August.  It wasn't really a wreath, but how can you NOT use an old tennis racket in this household?!

September.

October. It's hard to see from the picture, but these are all candy corn.  Jessica can attest to the fact that I burnt myself a lot making this one.

November.  Again, it's a little difficult to see in the picture, but that is all different colors of tulle.

December/Christmas