PAINTING UNDERWAY

We've been busy  painting over the past week or so. Last weekend, Barb and I spread about 18 gallons of primer on the drywall. But before we did that, we wiped all the walls down with a dust mop. Sounds sort of anal, huh? But, we missed a few areas with the dust mop and when we went to prime those areas, it made a real difference on how the paint rolled on. Glad we dusted the walls first.

AFTER A COAT OF PRIMER 

 

PAINTERS ON LUNCH BREAK

I ALLOWED THEM 15 MINUTES

BARB ON A ROLL(er)

Stephanie came down for two days earlier this week and put a finish coat on all the closets and also started trimming out the master bedroom. We're using Sherwin-Williams second best paint (Duration)...never imagined I would be paying $60 for a gallon of paint. But, it sure does go on nicely and covers very well. I figured that for the time we are going to invest in painting we may as well use good quality stuff.

ARTIST AT WORK

Prior to starting on the walls, Barb had been busy painting the exterior trim. I made racks in the garage and lower level so that we could stack all of this material while it dried. It will be nice to not have to paint it once it is on the house. I believe I reported earlier that the siding was painted in a factory in Michigan so there should only be some minimal touch-up once all of the exterior is completed.

DRYING RACKS FOR EXTERIOR TRIM

"THE HEAT IS ON"

As the Glenn Frey hit goes, "the heat is on". Remember the music from Beverly Hills Cop?

We started up the backup mode of the furnace almost two weeks ago. Since this is electric resistance heat, it is costly to heat this way but it was only temporary until we could get the geothermal heat operational. We had delayed starting the furnace at all until the guys were done with the drywall. Bad idea to be running the furnace when they are sanding the drywall as it would draw all of that dust into the duct work.

To provide heat while they were working on the walls, we relied on a propane gas heater and also an "electric furnace" that the HVAC contractor loaned out to me. The drawback to the electric heater is that it cost about $30 a day to run it but thankfully it was only for a week or so.

Once the drywallers were done, we gave the floor a good sweeping but there was still a lot of dust left in the nooks and crannies of the subfloor surface. I had read tips on either wet mopping the floor to pick up the remaining dust or even using a carpet shampooer. Since we have a carpet shampooer that Barb picked up at a garage sale several years back, I opted for that approach. Just used plain water and it worked very nicely. If I were to do it all over again, I might have covered the floor with rosin paper before all of that dirty work got underway.

Amazing how much moisture is introduced to the house when they "mud" the drywall. Over a three day period when they were finishing the walls, we took about 30 gallons of water out of the air using two dehumidifiers, one I already had and an industrial sized rental unit. I ran both of them for a week and am now just running our own unit in the basement.

Back to the furnace, we got the geothermal side of the system operational on Monday of last week. It's been purring along nicely since then, providing us with cheap heat compliments of groundwater provided by Mother Earth. I think we are going to love this setup. Very quiet and it seems like the air flow velocities are low which eliminates any "cold drafts", a complaint many people have with heat pumps which is technically what our system is.

....AND UNTO DUST THOU SHALL RETURN

The title of this post refers to all the drywall dust.
The drywall finishers wrapped up their work last week Sunday morning. They were anxious to get to the gun show at Hara Arena so they had an incentive to work quickly. Since then, we have been trying to get as much of the dust collected as possible.
We first vacuumed everything with a Shop Vac filter bag that is suited for drywall dust. I estimate that we picked up 20 lbs. of dust and that was after it had been swept with a broom.
Then, we started to clean it with a carpet shampoo machine. I know this sounds crazy but it was a tip from a contractor I found on the internet. Our HVAC contractor had suggested wet mopping it but the carpet cleaner seems to have been the better choice. Barb and I both had concerns about the dust underneath the carpeting eventually working it's way up into the living space.

 TRACY

...AND HIS BROTHER TERRY 

STOMPING THE WORKSHOP CEILING