Well, here we are again. I missed a week of posting and my fan base has erupted. Servers across the world crashed. Dogs living with cats. But rest easy. I’m back with another renovation update. I was traveling the past couple of weeks for work, one week in San Francisco and one week in the Detroit area. Lots of long days and not a lot of time for extracurricular activity. I hope everyone can forgive me.

We had the gutter team come in week before last and install the gutters, fascia, soffits, and trim. Another quick team! In and out in just a few days. They even worked on Saturday and Sunday of last weekend. We decided to go with all black gutters and trim. We’ll eventually paint the shutters black and side/paint the house in white. But that will be for another day. Priorities. It looks really good though!

As I wrote earlier, Sonya and I had originally wanted to expose the joists in the ceiling of the kitchen, but that idea didn’t exactly pan out. So she had the idea to install shiplap onto the ceiling. At this point, we’re about 2/3 of the way done installing that and it looks really good! There were a couple of challenges. The drains from the 2nd floor bathroom come into the kitchen ceiling and hang lower than the joists at the toilet drain. The result is a small bow in the shiplap, where we had to attach some shims, that we’re hoping won’t be noticeable. Another issue was from the installation of the drains where they had to put a few metal supports on the joists where the shower drain passed through. Those supports don’t really like brad nails, so there’s a bit of a “sag” there as well. But overall it’s looking really good. We’ve even had a couple of contracted guys mention how good it looks.

We still have some drywall to hang! Not our favorite part of the project, but necessary nonetheless. The living room still needs drywall hung on the ceiling after some evaluation of the joists, which have been sagging at different rates over the past 100 years or so. This past Saturday, we bought some 10′ 2×4’s for sistering with the existing joists to “level” the ceiling drywall as best as we can. We tackled the easier half (north end) of the ceiling by installing one 2×4. The south-end half will be more of a challenge.

A friend of ours, Jeff, brought by some homemade drywall jacks that he’d made back in the 1980’s. He’s also used them for installing awnings in the past. They came in very handy, especially after installing a couple the “old fashioned way”. It went fairly well. One of the sheets did fall onto my head when I made the mistake of relieving the sheet holding crew before enough screws were installed. That was the most exciting part of it. Anyway, we have about 40% of the living room ceiling installed. More drywall fun this week no doubt.

This past couple of weeks, Sonya was in her element with painting. We’re eager to get things done and move-in-ready. She just wanted to finish up the 2nd floor and say that it was done. They first started with tackling the girls’ room, painted a light blue. The bathroom was painted a mint-colored green, which they decided they didn’t like and will be choosing another color for. They also painted Seth’s room, with a darker blue accent wall and lighter beige for the other three walls. The “hangout room” outside of the girls’ room and the hallway was painted a darker beige. Then came Vivian’s room, painted a light pink, personally picked out by Vivian herself. Sunday, we picked out paint for our room, which she’ll likely start painting this week. I haven’t gotten a lot of pictures of the finished rooms yet. Sorry about that.

Post-painting (at least of the ceilings), came installing the lights and ceiling fans. Not much to say here, other than they’re very easy to install. Meagan and I installed the ceiling fans in the girls’ room and Seth’s room, I installed the Hangout Room and hallway lights, and Seth, Joelle & I installed the ceiling fans in our room and Vivian’s room. And they look really good!

We’re getting close everyone! More contractor work in the family room this week. They’re scheduled to be done with their work by the end of the month. Then we’ll have another couple of weeks of work and we should be ready to move in!