wanna whole lotta mud

Today's entry is merely a pictogram. All I'm saying is that drywall mud is a job best suited to someone else. And that I was right: ceiling/upside-down sucks as much as I thought it would. Bet that Sistine Chapel joint was a bitch on wheels (or scaffolding maybe).

BTW, I think I'm going to run out of clever mud puns way before I actually finish the job.

traffic

Don't know if anyone cares, but I just looked at the hit stats for my site for the first time, and I'm amazingly getting 30-40 unique hits every time I put up a new post. Certainly that's a fart in the forest in the realm of blog site hits, but when I started doing this, I seriously thought it would be a personal progress diary read by no one other than my mother, my best friend and myself in the future. Thanks everyone!

muddy mudskipper

Guess how I spent my Saturday? Trowlin' drywall mud, that's how. I've done very little of this kind of thing before and in case you were wondering, it's superf&*@in' tedious. And messy too. I used the pre-mixed compound (recommended for neophytes), and it comes in a very heavy box with the actual compound in a plastic bag. I'm not sure how one is supposed to get it from the bag to the tray, but I used a putty knife, and getting it all over your hands every time is pretty much unavoidable. It's sort of like when they scoop ice cream out of those big buckets at Baskin-Robbins, but less cold and gets all over your hands. Thank goodness my place has a big utility sink ten steps away in the laundry room.

Anyway, I have no exciting tales of near-death-by-electrocution or any other almost-tragic occurences. I did remove a couple of the new drywall pieces to add some shims in order to help level the seams before I started; it's sort of tricky to get everything perfectly level when you're adding to existing drywall. I guess this is a good argument for completely tearing everything out and replacing it all, but that would've been a nightmarishly huge undertaking. My hair hurts contemplating the prospect of buying/moving that much drywall, as well as the massive amount of old drywall I'd have to deal with. I think this will come out pretty nice, and truthfully, a great deal of the walls will be obscured by cabinets anyway (my favorite Pink Floyd record: "Obscured By Cabinets"). I added new corner pieces for the window and compounded those guys too- you have to use a lot. Realized too late that you're supposed cut them at angles so they're flush against each other, but I think I can just mud over the corners in such a way that it won't be noticeable. Oops.

Only thing I haven't mudded yet is the ceiling, which I'll attack tomorrow. Other than the obvious additional complication of its upside-downness, it shouldn't be too bad; we didn't do that much new drywall up there. It'll probably be a couple of stages of boring-as-hell sanding, applying more mud, etc. I expect this to go on for a couple days at least. I also expect to suck back a couple of pounds of dryed-compound dust, so all those of years of non-smokin' heathy lungs are pretty much being erridicated. Cough.

I still haven't made any solid decisions about lighting up there, so for the time being I'm leaving the fluorescents and messy holes in the middle of the ceiling. I'm definitely doing recessed lights, but I think I'm gonna wait until I install the cabinets and island so I can have the best three-dimensional idea of exactly where and how many to do. I intend to have an electrician do it, not only because of prior mentioned electro-spark fests, but moreso because the install's gonna entail crawling around in the attic and me no wanna do that.

drywalls and bridges, and the mitchneyland electrical parade.

Here's another in the riveting Time-Life before/after carnage-in-the-wild series. On top we have el kitchen with all soffits torn down, and as you can see, much of the drywall ripped out. In case you're wondering why we ripped out so much: the lower areas were largely tortured after I tore out the ceramic tile backsplashes mentioned in other posts, and the upper parts, as you can see on the right side didn't exist because the soffits previously lived up there. It makes sense to have large pieces of drywall as opposed to a ton of little ones- less joints, and easier to attach, because there has to be adequate framing behind to screw it into (they aren't there yet in the pic on the left, but I added some extra 2x4's between the studs so we'd have places to screw in drywall). Fortunately, my good friend Myke was in town to help, as he has more drywall experience than I, and we were up 'til midnite cutting and installing Tuesday night. If you're ever done drywall, you know that it weighs a metric-ton, and moving it and holding it over your head gets real painful real quick. Yowch.

But that's only the beginning of the fun. Y'all are gonna LOVE this...

Electrical Calamity #1

It's not really visible in the pic, but one unexpected glitch was that the 120v power lines for the outlets ran down from the attic. These were very tightly routed through the previously-there soffits at angles, and tightly stapled in place. That meant that there was no way we'd be able to put drywall all the way up to the ceiling, because it would've run into the power wires, and of course, there wasn't enough slack to just shove them up in the ceiling. Clearly these wires were going to need to be extended. Now, with 120v, it's not like your stereo speakers- it isn't a super good idea to just cut 'em and twist in some new wire. If you want to even remotely comply with code (and reduce the chances of a mishap causing an in-wall electrical fire), you want to use a metal or plastic utility box screwed into the wall and do your wire cap splicin' exploits in there. Safety first, right?

So, off to Lowe's we trudged for the third time that day where I bought a bunch of boxes, wire nuts, slick new black outlets and Romex cable (as the B-52's say, Romex if you want to). Next day I yanked out the master fuses to shut off power to the entire house, because, as mentioned, safety first. Well, I made a small error here. Since we were going to be putting up drywall with strategically cut holes for the outlets, I didn't screw them into their respective boxes in the wall. I simply left the outlets sticking out of the wall, supported by their wires (which are very rigid). Then I turned the power back on. While attempting to plug my little outlet voltage checker into the outlet, I accidentally pushed the hot lead on the side of one of the outlets into the metal wall box (the one it should've been screwed into). Anyone out there in blog land know what happens when a hot 120v lead touches a ground? Ever seen one of those Fourth of July firework fountains? Something like that, but more electrical-ly. The side of the plug managed to arc weld itself to the the side of the box before it blew the breaker. To say this got our attention would be a tremendous understatement. Fortunately I was wearing big gloves when this occurred. To his credit, Myke was amazingly calm about this. I was a little freaked.

Electrical Calamity #2
Jumping ahead a couple of hours, we ready to hang another piece of drywall when I realized that I hadn't yet extended one of the wires to the right of the sink. Seeing as it was getting dark out, I wasn't keen to turn off all the power and severly compromise in-house visibility for either of us. This mess of outlets+switch was the same one providing the aforementioned fireworks, and since it had blown a breaker, I figured "hey, the breaker is already off, so no power here". I even checked the plugs with my little plug-in checker. No light. No power. Soooooo... the metal box had about four different power cables running into it (the junction boxes also provide power for adjacent outlets in other locations in the room). Confident the power was off (but still wearing big gloves) I began yanking this big cable through the box, which was difficult because of the other wires as well as the cruelly oblique angles it had been bent to. With the cable almost out of the box (and its two wires stripped and exposed...), I gave it a good heave ho, then BLAP BLAP BLAP... a spark shower even more impressive than the first followed by every room in the vicinity going black (it was totally dark out by now. Inside too.) Needless to say, this REALLY got our attention. And really scared the crap out of me. Again, fortunately, no personal harm. And again, Myke was surprisingly calm, and likely doubting my electrician skills*. Apparently, that breaker DIDN'T shut off everything in there. I went outside, pulled the master breaker, and by the light of Myke's flashlight, I finished extending the necessary wire. Of course it had popped more breakers (including one that killed about 70% off the lights in my house) and I was so freaked out and worried that I might've wired something screwy, I didn't even attempt to reset the breakers 'til the next day. For the record, everything was fine the next day, and no electrical explosions thus far.

Back to drywall world...
I also had to cut a bunch of notches in the framing at the tops for the wires to slot into. Ever hold a sawzall over your head for a while? That also hurts. Myke and I finished as much as we could Tuesday night, and I finished the rest today. We also had to replace a LOT of insulation, because the old stuff falls apart and leaves a lovely noxious dust in the air. Currently all the drywall is installed, but I haven't begun the process of applying tons of drywall compound ("mudding") and taping to smooth over joints, screw holes and remnants of prior electrical firestorms (just kidding). Next step after that is paint, and somewhere in there, the flooring guys shall arrive for polished concrete glory. Slowly, it's starting to actually improve.

*They who know me can confirm that I've successfully built a lot of electronic crap, know the difference between a volt and an amp, and that I'm generally pretty crafty with a soldering iron. But by my own admission, the vast majority of my electronic mucking about is with audio gear where the voltages are almost always completely harmless, i.e. you'd have to make a very concerted effort to hurt yourself. Domestic 120v mains power, on the other hand, can easily hurt you, and I won't hesitate to say that it scares me bit.

soffit gets a beatdown.

This was the other night when we (Myke and I) finished pulling down all the soffits, which was a royal pain. We've since done a LOT of drywalling: not only have we replaced all the holes made by above soffit destructo, we also replaced almost all the unsalvageable drywall wherence (see how I just made a word out of "where" and "whence"?) acres of horrid pink ceramic tile used to live. I also had some electrical (mis) adventures, but I'll go into that in my next post. In the meantime, show all your friends the above stupidity of me goin' whack-a-mole with a four-pound sledge.

BTW, for our Nine Inch Nails fans, the soundtrack of this video sounds EXACTLY like the beginning of "Mr. Self-Destruct". Extra bonus points for anyone on FB comments who can name where it actually comes from (John, you're disqualified because I know you know).