Day 52 (July 7)

Stonework on front has been been completed for several days. Since last post it's been mostly having the drywall taped and mudded getting ready for the ceiling guys and finish sanders. It has rained pretty much everyday. And not the gentle kind.

 Office arch

attic access

Day 45 - Leach field

Sunday and still no rest. My excavator and I (and 1 other guy) dug and installed 800 feet of leach line for the septic system. Took about 5.5 hours but felt more like 12. Too tired and dehydrated to think to take a picture apparently. Will try to get one later this week.


But here is how the house currently looks. 1 or 2 more days and all stonework should be done.

Day 44 - Saturday, June 29

For the past couple days we have had a drywall guy that comes in after the hanging is done and starts taping and mudding over nails and screws. He will work over the course of a week or so doing his part. Upon taping the ceiling in the great room, it became very evident we had a sagging truss which was leaving a very noticeable bulge in our ceiling. This morning I went down and with the help of the drywall guy, we managed to raise the truss up to make the bulge much less noticeable. He propped the ceiling from below and I was the sap that crawled up in the attic (of course they just blew the insulation yesterday morning to make it a real pain) and using a 2x6, we braced the the truss to keep it lifted. Seemed to work.

Later, my excavator came and did a few things. One of which was scraping mud from yet another downpour off the main road. After he left, I had the pleasure of watching what he had done fail when - you guessed it - yet another downpour blew through. Seems like a daily event down there. So out I went in the rain with my mattock and shovel to manually divert the diversion ditch my excavator had tried to make. Not his fault. Just merciless rain for weeks and weeks.

Day 43 - more stonework

Drywall is hung except for a couple sheets that they were apparently short. The floor mess is all cleaned up. Stone guys got more stone up today. Looking good.

Day 41 - 2nd day of drywall hanging.

As of this afternoon, most of the drywall is up. One of the guys was going around zipping in screws in the middle areas of the drywall sheets (called "the field"). They nail the perimeter. Would be much happier if they used screws everywhere to avoid future nail pops but can't control that. Was disappointed to see entire sheets with only 6 to 8 screws total in them. Very poor in many places as evidenced by several places where it looks good with many screws in. Will address with FM.

Stone guys starting to add stone veneer. Looks good so far.


On the way down to see the house we saw this van in front of us. Gotta love a Star Wars geek right Rodney?

 standing in dining room looking across foyer to living room (Office). Arches turned out good so far.

Day 40 - Drywall start

Drywall started today. What a mess! Our dumpster is full which doesn't help all the trash pieces of drywall laying around the house. But it's supposed to be messy right now. Interesting to see what a difference it makes as it closes off spaces from one another after being used to seeing from one end of the house to the other through studs. We did catch 1 problem where they completely drywalled over a light switch box and didn't cut it back out. Notifying our field manager tonight about that.

Stone guys are getting ready to face the house. Skids of the veneer are on site now as well as a pile of sand mix for their mortar.

Excavator buried a pipe from the septic tank to our  field across the road (under) and is ready to install the leach lines.

Thanks to Blog viewers

Just checked my Blog stats today and see I'm at 4,450 page views since starting the blog. That seems like a lot to me. Thanks to everyone who has been following our progress to date. I will continue to try to be both informative and (when possible) entertaining to keep you reading! Thank you everyone!