Fun And Labor Over Labor Day Weekend

Well two more weekends have gone by since our last visit to the house.  Laurie and Matt took a cross-country road trip to take him and his car back to school in Texas and I was in California moving my mother to AZ after her husband passed away earlier in the month.  The other weekend we felt we needed to stay in the valley to take care of things and we are glad we did as my sister's A/C unit died and my mom spent her first weekend in AZ at our place to avoid the heat.

This was our first weekend after Laurie started her new job.  It was different waiting until after 7pm to drive up to Payson where in the past we have left early in the day or even taken the extra day off.  We were thankful that traffic was not too bad for a three-day holiday weekend.  We did not get much done on Friday after getting up there around 9pm.

Our priority this weekend was to remove everything from one half of the house to allow the drywall taping/texturing to be started. This meant removing all ceiling fans from the three bedrooms, the light fixtures from the master bath, laundry, hall and pantry and then moving all equipment and items from all those areas into the great room.  That also included taking out the vanity and toilet from the master bathroom to allow new texturing to be done behind these units.  But before we jumped into all that work, we decided to start with breakfast in Pine and then went to the craft fair.  We found it was mostly the same booths as we saw at the 4th of July event, but Laurie did find some things to buy.  We also stopped by the thrift store to pick up king size pillow cases for use in the Valley.  We were very happy we went up to Pine early for breakfast as there was a couple mile backup on the highway of people trying to get into Pine.  Dodged that bullet!

We stopped at Restore for a kitchen cabinet and sink that we can use temporarily until we are ready to build or purchase our kitchen cabinets.  We need to have the kitchen sink in to satisfy the final permit inspection.  We found something that would work for us and all we will need to do is cut a plywood top to set the sink in.  The whole cost was only $20, including two light fixtures Laurie found.

We drove up to Star Valley to look at some pre-built storage buildings we saw there a few weeks back while driving to Christopher Creek.  We are trying to get some ideas for what we want for the workshop we will be building in the back yard.  We can build a 144 sq.ft. structure without having a permit, so we want to find the right plan to maximize the space. They had some great barn style units that have storage space in the rafters.  They also have some with roll-up doors available that would be great for moving larger items in and out of the building.  We found we cannot buy the pre-built units because they deliver them complete and they are too large to fit through our 9' double gates, but we now have some good ideas for building our own.

We finally started working on Sunday.  Laurie's dad showed up in the morning on his way to Christopher Creek to help us return our excess drywall to Home Depot.  We did not have anything long enough to transport the 12' sheets and he has an extender bar on his hitch that allows 12' items to be put into the bed of his truck.  This freed up a lot of floor space in our great room. We also picked up all the taping and texturing supplies for the next couple of weeks.

Next was to throw away all excess drywall we had been saving for patching or small areas.  Now that we are done, we no longer need these pieces, though we did save a couple just in case.  Our dumpster is now completely full so we will need to make plans to have it swapped out.  All the tools stored in the guest bedroom were moved to our small workshop building and everything else was moved into the great room.  It didn't take long to fill that room up again.

Our great room filled to the hilt

On Monday we dismantled our bedroom and bathroom.  We had to put a drywall patch where the medicine cabinet was since the new one will mount on the wall which is easier than cutting a hole for it.  The toilet and vanity we saved to donate to Restore as they are still in decent shape.  All our clothes were put into one of the pantry cabinets in the great room and our bed fit against a wall in the dining room.  The back of the house is bare and ready for the taping and texturing.

Empty den except for taping/texturing supplies

A cleaned out laundry closet

Matt's room really clean for once

Master bath with no fixtures and all patches

In the afternoon, Craig and Steve stopped by to show us samples of the different types of texturing that they are recommending for the house.  We picked the Santa Fe design for the walls and a regular skip trowel for the ceilings.  Even though only the kitchen ceiling is new, we are having the whole ceiling re-textured so it will match as you can see the history of patches, plus we had to do some patching of our own.  They decided to get started on the work as soon as we left so we packed up the car just after 5pm and hit the road which allowed us to avoid some of the three-day weekend traffic.

P.S. - Almost forgot that Laurie came up to the house on Tuesday, 9/24, for an overnighter to meet with another drywall company to get a quote for taping and texturing our house.  While she was there, Craig came by and installed the skylight where the old stove pipe used to be.  It adds a lot of light to the room and kept us from having to patch the roof as the skylight was slightly bigger than the stovepipe.

New skylight in place of stovepipe

No more ugly metal tube on roof

Stats: 2 Home Depot trips; 2 Walmart trips
Remodeling expense 8/16-9/5: $717
Remodeling expense to date: $31,899