My grandmother recently asked Gabe if the kitchen would be done by Christmas!! He was highly insulted. Things are rolling along now and I finally got to do something besides clean up after everyone else! Gabe got all the electrical roughed in so it was my job to hang insulation. You should have seen me with my tape measure, exacto knife and staple gun. I looked like a construction chick on one of those home improvement shows! How do you get one of those jobs anyway? Not that they would hire me. Even though I look great in the gear I am like a Lucille Ball comedy routine when I actually try to do the work. First of all I was hanging insulation during the hottest days of June. And you have to wear long sleeves and long pants because, baby, that insulation gets itchy! So here I am measuring the wall, rolling out insulation, cutting it with the knife… Ooops! The knife blade is dull and rips the insulation to shreds. I take the knife apart, replace the blade and cannot get the knife back together. What an idiot! It’s not like it’s hard. It only has 4 pieces and I just took it apart so I should know how to reassemble it. After sitting on the floor and muttering to myself for a few minutes. Gabe comes over to rescue me (as he always does). He puts the knife back together in 5 seconds (somehow this does not make me feel any better). Ok, back to the insulation. Cut the butchered piece of insulation a little straighter and smoother now. Drag the ladder over to where I want to hang the insulation. Climb up the ladder and realize I forgot the staple gun on the floor. Climb down the ladder, get the staple gun and go back up the ladder. Now I realize that the ladder is not positioned properly so I try to lean over to the wall. As I teeter on the ladder I realize this is a bad decision so down I go again to move the ladder. Back up the ladder. Where is the staple gun? Back on the floor where I put it when I moved the ladder. Back down the ladder, get the staple gun, back up the ladder. It has taken me about 1/2 hour but I have hung my first piece of insulation! The work progresses on like this with small improvements in efficiency as I get the hang of things. I fight the urge to hang the insulation with all the lettering going in the same direction (that’s my anal retentive side) so I can get the project done this century.
Once the insulation was finished Gabe and a friend hung all the blue board on a single Saturday. I spent that Sunday cutting up all the leftover sheets of blue board into small pieces so the trash men would not hate us more than they already do. Yep, more cleaning. We also got all the spare wood cut up and moved to the wood pile. No, I did not do any of that cutting. It involves sharp blades moving at a high rate of speed so I am not allowed anywhere near. Gabe cut, I stacked. The weekend after the blue board was hung our friends Billy and Bruce came to plaster. It took them about 12 hours but they finished the whole room and it looks beautiful! It looks like a real room now! Gabe primed the whole room the weekend I did the cancer walk. I felt guilty about not being around to paint but I was walking for a good cause.The cabinets have arrived and are in the garage at the moment. We did carry a few base units into the kitchen so Gabe could start thinking about how to install them.
The walls are straight but the floor…that’s another story. The floor has a 1 1/2 inch difference from one end to the other. It has such a bow in the middle that we are thinking of leaving it the way it is and installing a Koi pond! I guess that won’t work. The kitties would try to catch the fish and I would end up with dead Koi all over the place, which means…more cleaning!! There are some products on the market that you can put down to level the floor but we have to make sure it does not raise the height too much or we will end up with a 2” step up into the kitchen. That’s not going to work with me stumbling around. I’ll trip on it every day. Since I am a black belt I should be able to roll across the floor and recover my footing like a ninja but that will be hard on the floor and hard on my body.
So, where are we? The ceiling and walls are done. The ceiling fan and all the lights are working. Electrical work is just about finished and cabinets are ready to be installed. Plumbing and gas lines still need to be done. Then it’s counters, appliances, and floors. We’re almost done, right???
And yes, we are still eating takeout.
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