2012 Vacation

In three weeks of Stephen's vacation, we painted the interior of the apartment, put in oak floors, and started the dog fence. I usually do all of our painting, but we used a paint gun this time, and I don't know how to do that very well.



Stephen also insulated and drywalled part of the garage after putting in a big beam with a post between the garage doors. That post and beam were in my original design, but Stephen took them out of the plan while building so the post wouldn't get in the way of his workshop area. After walking around on the upstairs floor and considering how much weight the wood stove, the tile surround, wood floor, etc. would add, he reconsidered. The upstairs doesn't creak at all anymore.

He also put in most of the electrical outlets and one of the phones. The only phone we had to plug in was the wooden junction phone with the mouthpiece attached to the wooden box and a handheld earpiece, and I talked to my parents for awhile the other day. I put the phone box between my knees and talked into it all hunched over for a half an hour. Not awesome.

I've probably already said this, but Sherwin Williams paint is amazing. We only used Valspar at our old house. Also, I highly recommend the cheaper Bruce solid hardwood floors. I think they were only $3 a foot, and after reading the reviews, I was afraid that the wood pieces would be short. They weren't. Many prefinished floors make deep grooves between the boards, but these have less of a problem than most of the others we looked at. And they're made in the U.S. We had almost no waste, and we blind nailed 500+ square feet in two days. It would've taken less time if we had used a compressor nail gun. The last two feet of each sidewall had to be top nailed because the manual nailer requires the used of a sledgehammer and there's no space to swing against the wall, but that part of each wall will be covered with cabinetry eventually.

Vacation ended last week, and it still didn't get quite done this weekend, so I'm going to try to finish it by myself today.