We’re now at the point of trying to push things to an end and it’s been a busy few weeks.

After drywall boards went up, it took a week for mudding and sanding to be completed. We got a taste of the misery that is drywalling when we tackled the garage wall that’s shared with the house, hoisting heavy boards up into the rafters and mudding the seams to create an air barrier between house and garage, as required by code. 

Messy work done, we fired up a generator and spent a day vacuuming up six months’ worth of dirt, construction debris, and drywall dust to clean up ahead of painting. Our floors were looking grim, but we were assured it would clean up easily after painting was done. To keep things on pace, we hired professional painters. We had strongly considered doing our own painting but decided to hire it out to save ourselves teetering about trying to cover those high ceilings. We’re glad we did as they got the house primed and coated with two coats of paint in less than a week.

We were moving along at a good clip and looking forward to getting the floors sealed to bring them back to the shiny, polished look. First though, they needed a good cleaning. We had a short window to get this done – our concrete installer could only come on a rainy day when he couldn’t pour slabs outside. With a single day of rain in the forecast for the next few weeks, we scheduled our project manager to clean the floors the day after painting was complete and. . . it didn’t work. Determined to keep things on track, we rushed over after work and spent seven hours scrubbing and rescrubbing the floors until there was no light left in the day. We left with our fingers crossed that our efforts had paid off. Thankfully, they had and the contractor was able to seal it the next day, bringing back the shiny finish to the floors. We’ve since been diligently recovering them with our endless supply of cardboard from our kitchen cabinets, which we’ve also been hard at work installing.

We also had the shower surrounds tiled in the hall bath and the ensuite. This took several weeks of starts and stops but turned out well.