Drywall! Drywall! It is EVERYWHERE!

Rewind to Tuesday. We passed our insulation inspection in the afternoon & our contractor confirmed the drywallers to start Wednesday. Jump to Friday afternoon. The drywallers have hung drywall throughout our entire house! The entire 1st & 2nd floors & a bit of the basement; all in 3 work days! There were speed demons! We have been waiting since mid-December for another big "oh my goodness" moment. We hadn't seen a dramatic change since the framers built the start of the side & back porches and framed the new floor plan inside. The months in between have been spent filling the space between the studs those framers installed. Electrical, plumbing, HVAC and finally insulation all needed to happen before we got another dose of drama. Good drama I should specify. Well, here it is, in pictures; the work of the wild men drywall crew. Starting tomorrow they will tape & sand the whole beast! Stay turned for photos of that.

It may not look like much, but to come into the house &
see these first glimpses of drywall made me act like a
fool! I was jumping up & down, clapping my hands &
squealing. I think the drywall guys thought I was insane.

View of the kitchen into the dining room.

View the opposite way - from the dining room
back into the kitchen

There were stacks of drywall everywhere
on Wednesday. This is the view from our
bedroom up the hallway to the front of the
house.

View up the stairs to the outside wall of
Chris' office

More photos - can you tell how excited this stage made me??

Chris loving his new office drywall!

Chris admiring the mess & drywall in the 2nd
bedroom

I am profoundly excited about the kitchen,
even partially drywalled!

Don't mind the mess- check out the drywall! Also note the
yellow walls are holdovers from our plaster days! We kept
5-10% of the plaster walls.

The stairs are starting to look legit! Except
for the whole not having a banister for
the landing.........details.

I hadn't played with the panoramic feature on my phone in awhile - drywall inspired me to take one of the kitchen and
family room. 

I continue to be unreasonably excited about the
basement laundry area; which got drywall too!

Our bedroom is starting to take shape!

Update March 25, 2016:

This is just too funny not to add:

The drywallers rocking their stilts to get the mud on the tops
of the walls & the ceilings

Just another day at the Grant St circus!

Insulation Station!

Who knew how incredibly fast the insulators would work?? Not me!

Welcome home - to a hazmat situation!
Apparently it is not good to expose your
skin or lungs to spray foam insulation....

On Friday around 12 noon I went to the house with a wonderful friend, Tanya, who drove in from Iowa. I gave her the exterior tour because it was clear the door was blocked by plastic sheeting. I tried to open the door & shouted hello through it; but the sheeting was taped over the door! Thankfully, this gentleman appeared & let us in. It was time for them to break for lunch he told us. Perfect; given how long Tanya had driven, I didn't want her tour to end at the mud pit yard!

Chris' office was almost done when the guys broke for
lunch. All done in the afternoon.

By that time (12 noon on Friday) the insulators had sprayed the foam throughout the 2nd floor! They worked so fast!

Chris & I went back together on Saturday & the insulators had completed the entire 1st floor Friday afternoon! Lickety split I'd say! (how do you spell lickety? lickity? Spell check doesn't like any of it. Hopefully you get my meaning despite any spelling shortcomings :)

Upstairs bathroom will be toasty!

Yahoo! Our bedroom is good to go!

The only other areas that need insulation are the attic, basement & crawlspace under the future family room. Those areas don't get sprayed; they get the old school batting insulation which apparently takes longer to install. They should be done by tomorrow at noon, meaning we'll have the insulation inspected Tuesday afternoon! Zoom! 

I think Willa was quite impressed with our 1st floor
insulation!

I love the old kitchen exhaust fan we kept -
the Air King! Our bedroom is insulated!

Next up? DRYWALL! Eek! We're chugging along!

Bonjour les Portes Françaises

Translation: Hello French Doors!

Clearly I'm having a French kind of day with the post titles. I do love the language - though my great friend who has been a high school French teacher for years would likely wish I had asked her to translate........rather than Google translate :)

Our master bedroom (and the 2nd floor generally) is going to have a good bit more light now that our French doors have been installed.

Either way, here are our new doors:

Someday we will wake up & look out these doors. Hopefully that day is sooner rather than later!

Opening out to the sun porch; envisioning this in the spring
& summer is making my day.

Assuming we leave our bedroom door open,
we will be able to see out of the French doors
from the front of the house!

Demo & Dumpster Delivery

Seriously. Joy.

How could I ever have anticipated the sheer joy I felt when I received this text from our contractor?!? Our dumpster arrived the first week in November! Yay! The debris that has been building for several weeks will now find a happy home in the backyard's newest purple addition!

We're pretty happy with our Northwestern purple dumpster!

A few more photos of what the demo crew has been up to......

It only took 1 work day for the new dumpster to be almost full!

And now it is really full.....2 working days to clear out the
giant debris piles that had accumulated.

1st floor view from the dining room through the wall into the
future kitchen (on the right) and the future rehabbed bathroom
(on the left)

2nd floor- view over the demo debris pile from the dining room (future
2nd bedroom) into the kitchen (future master bedroom) into the sun porch
at the back of our house!

Surprise! The porta potty is here! We have all
your bathroom needs covered! If your bathroom
needs don't involve running water.......or indoor
plumbing. Its fancy. Trust me.

Demo Days 5 & 6 - The Walls Come Tumbling Down

I mean, really, they are. The walls are dropping like flies! Two more days of demolition this week meant such eye candy for Chris & me. 

Day 5 saw the wall between the 1st floor kitchen & 3rd (back) bedroom come down. The wall between the 1st floor 2nd bedroom & back stairs came apart, just enough to look through. The east wall of the first floor kitchen lost its plaster. The garbage continues to pile up in epic fashion; we're still playing a waiting game with the permits......and the dumpster. We brought some crowbars over to the house to go on a bit of a treasure hunt on the 2nd floor. We were hoping that someone had stashed (& then forgotten about) bars of gold or boxes of money in the built in cabinet accessed from the bathroom. The doors to the cabinet were painted shut; so Chris knocked them in. No treasure. Sort of disappointed :( Its always fun to break stuff though!

You can see straight through the
1st floor from front to back!

Chris wielding the crowbar

The debris pile keeps growing in our future family room

Our living room rocks both a stove & fridge.
Oh & some sinks.

Just the right size to peek through to the back stairwell

Day 6 was even more dramatic. The back stairs are completely gone. Giant hole from the 2nd floor down to the basement! The walls between the 1st & 2nd floor 2nd bedrooms and the back stairwell are gonezo! Its insane. We can now look from the top of the front stairs all the way back to the back wall of the house! We can get a sense for the size/shape of our future kitchen on the 1st floor & our bedroom on the 2nd floor. The debris from the demo is getting comical, if it wasn't already. There are piles everywhere! I continue to be so happy with the guys doing the work. They've kept things as tidy as is possible given our dumpster-less situation. They continue to sweep up at the end of each day. Its the little things, right?

We love the treasure hiding in the walls. This page from the
"Chicago Evening American" is dated Tuesday
May 8, 1928. That is a really long time ago!

Chris pondering the 2nd floor through
the hole where the back stairs had been. Note the piles...
growing, growing, growing.

The old 1st floor kitchen was on the left
Chris is standing where the closet for the 2nd bedroom used to be.

Feeling on top of the world on the "pantry platform"
From my perch at the back of the 2nd floor I can see
down through the old stairwell into the basement!

View from 2nd floor kitchen pantry down through the floor
all the way to the basement!

Demolition Day 4 - Back Stairs, Head Knocker, 2nd Floor Kitchen

Seriously, this demolition is just about the best thing in our lives right now.

It is a concrete sign that Grant St will in fact, despite all the waiting, become our home sometime (relatively soon we hope!). 

There were 3 guys working in the house yesterday, they accomplish so much wonderful destruction every time they come. This part is slightly addictive & I assume the next phase, when things are being built, will find us similarly obsessed with evening visits to see the progress.

Demolition day 4 saw the removal of the back stairs, major work on Chris' future office, the removal of the dreaded head knocker on the front stairs, and huge work on the 2nd floor kitchen (our future bedroom).

Enjoy the photos! We've been enjoying wandering around the house seeing all the insanity demolition brings.

Selfie in our future bedroom!
Presumably we won't take selfies here once it is our actual bedroom.....

Hanging out in our future master bathroom, casually looking
through the wall of what used to be the 2nd floor kitchen.

Hahahhahahah. Look at that pile of rubble!
We'll have a dumpster once we have permits.
For now, these piles are really funny to me.
This is the 2nd floor kitchen; our future bedroom.

Cheers to Chris' future office!
Goodbye to the headknocker on the front steps
(which was the closet) & the south wall!

Hip hip hooray! Au revoir to the headknocker!
The dark line at the top of the photo shows what used to be the headknocker.
Not there anymore, which makes the stairway feel airy & light & wonderful!

Ah! There is no longer a wall to the 2nd floor
1st bedroom! This room is Chris' future office.

Check out the outline of the steps on the right of the photo.
They are gone!
Only the slats that supported the plaster beneath remain!

View from the first floor landing up the back steps.
Same as above; look to the top/right of the photo to
see the outline of where the stairs used to be. It is wild.

Oh carpet, you seem endless

And you are time consuming to rip out. 

But, as I type this, 100% of the carpet that was in our house when we bought it, is now in the garbage. Please note- I hate adding huge amounts of trash to landfills - but the carpet really had to go. It was in such rough shape I didn't think anyone would want to use it for anything.

Here are the things I suspect some previous owner of our home thought when installing this carpet:

-Its durable!

-Its easy to clean!

-It is cozy!

-It masks construction quirks after the back room was added to the first floor!

Here are the things I think about the carpet:

-It is durable!

-It is impossible to make look clean!

-It looks a bit like it fell out of the ugly tree & managed to hit most of the branches on the way down.

So, feast your eyes on some before & afters :)

 In progress- 1st Floor - 1st Bedroom

 In progress- 1st Floor - 1st Bedroom - very serious business for Chris

In progress - 1st Floor - 1st Bedroom

Before- 1st Floor - 2nd Bedroom

After -1st Floor - 2nd Bedroom

After - 1st Floor - 2nd Bedroom

Before - 1st Floor - 3rd Bedroom (yes its off the kitchen & no it won't remain a bedroom in our plans!)

Before - 1st Floor - 3rd Bedroom - like the berber? Looks good, right?

In progress - 1st Floor - 3rd Bedroom - always looks worse before it looks better ;)

Almost done - 1st floor - 3rd bedroom - we love how pretty the wood is!

Almost done - 1st floor - 3rd bedroom - don't mind the mismatched wood, the badly patched wall, or the giant post. That's what our general contractor is for!

After- 1st Floor - Foyer - who knew the bottom step would be the worst carpet removal in the whole house?!?

After - 1st Floor Foyer - hard to tell....but under the green tile & black adhesive stuff is wood flooring....the big question is; is is salvageable??