A lot has happened in the last few weeks!

For many months the walls looked like this:

The framers constructed the exterior walls with both normal vertical supports and these great little horizontal pieces (we’re not 100% sure, but I think the horizontal ‘studs’ are there for fire retardation…building code stuff).

Regardless of the reason they’re there, we grew to love those useful little nooks.

We loved them so much we added more of our own. Here’s Mark building shower niches into the wall.

When someone said, “The bug spray is in the medicine cabinet” we knew just where to go. For a long time it felt as if we had moved in. Who needs proper walls? Who needs electricity? Who needs running water when we have all these bottles of the stuff (and a port-a-potty)?

Homebuilding, the way we’re doing it, will make you crazy. Specifically, this definition of schizophrenia: emotional blunting, intellectual deterioration, social isolation, disorganized speech and behavior, delusions, and hallucinations.

Delusions ran high at this point.

(Disorganized speech comes later – don’t worry, you’ll get to read about that too. I expect to be in full hallucination mode by the time this thing is finished. Social isolation is the worst though. We miss seeing our friends. )

Then insulators did their thing and we were snapped back into reality.

The crew sprayed a radiant barrier on the interior upstairs roof and it dropped the temperature immediately. Radiant barriers rock.

A member of our team had a bit of food poisoning, but carried on like a trooper regardless. Pepto-Bismol® and traditional insulation are practically the same color. It took an hour to find those tablets.

We insulated the garage ourselves. I’ve never lived in a house with a properly functioning garage. I am all sorts of excited about this thing.

In the meantime, the sheetrock arrived…

…and it went up.

Well, a lot of it went up – a lot went down too. This is very messy work, folks.

There are no pictures of the taping & bedding process. Mostly because finishing the deck consumed our attention while they did their thang, but also because they were incredibly large, half-naked men on stilts (thankfully it was the top half). Unlike some other tradesmen who shall remain nameless, these guys always showed up on time and they did a great job. After they wrapped up their work, I realized how much I miss their falsetto sing-alongs with techno mariachi music. It’s a quieter and less interesting place without them. I do not, however, miss the sweaty, naked beer bellies at eye level.

Next up, the texture guy – who remained fully clothed the whole time. He had his work cut out for him because we paid for completely smooth walls. It might not seem obvious at first, but the smoother the wall, the more work is involved. Texture covers up a multitude of sins.

By this point, we finished the deck and were ready to start our next job – painting inside. The texture guy was a fountain of knowledge and we’re grateful he shared some of it with us. For example, who knew buying plastic sheeting and tape at Kelly Moore was considerably cheaper ($11) than The Home Depot or Lowes ($25) for the same products?

And he gave us a tutorial on how to make quick work of prepping.

I don’t want to relive the nightmare of our first round of paint (it soaked straight into the walls, gallon after gallon after five gallon bucket – who knew painting new construction would be such a freakin’ headache?), so I’ll just skip right to the fun pictures.

Father-in-law worked the paint sprayer in about fifteen layers of clothes on a 100 degree Fahrenheit day. God bless that man.

Gunfight in the hall.

Teamwork.

Still smiling (and looking ridiculously cute) at the end of a long day. We’re so fortunate to have this man on our team.

It’s coming along. Slowly but surely.