The Genius of Panel Lifts

Who ever invented this contraption is freakin' brilliant. Can you imagine lifting sheets of 5/8" drywall over your head to screw them to a 9 foot ceiling?

I can.

And I am REALLY glad I didn't have to do it.

I rented this panel lift and in a few hours had all the drywall fastened to the ceiling in the kitchen. By myself!

The best part is that the kitchen is really starting to take shape (literally). It is hard to imagine a space when you can see through the 2x4 framed walls and ceiling. When it all gets covered you can see it actually being a kitchen (imagine that...).


The dining room buffet wall getting covered

Just needs a 'little' tape and mud...
Recessed lights will be above the counters and work spaces.

The family visiting the house during the holidays

Alistair, Liesl, Orion, Larry, Sally, Casey, Kyle, Susan, and Brian (Liz taking the pic). Here we are in front of the new house after Thanksgiving.

Somehow this is the only shot of the outside of the house I have...

The pink is especially stunning in this light. Or as we refer to it, 'cooked salmon'!

Odds and ends

Our wonderful window with (most) of the paint scraped off.





Alistair telling ghost stories in the new house. "It was a dark and scary night..."

Actually we have no idea why he likes hanging out in front of the halogen work lights. I keep telling him it won't help his tan unless catching on fire counts...




It snowed like we were somewhere other than Oregon right before Christmas. Here is a nice shot of the 'his and hers' wheel burrows in the back yard.

It's all about the pictures... of the basement.

Down to the basement (notice 95 years worth of grubby hands on the wall)

Proper creaky stairs

Lots of room for shop space.

Big ol' basement.

Nice big original basement windows. The fir frames are still in good condition thanks to big eves on the roof.

The old laundry room...
and the new laundry area.

NEWS FLASH

We passed our electrical cover inspection today! It has been drawn out much longer than we had hoped. But a few snow storms and and a picky inspector later we are good to go. This means we can finally throw up the rest of the insulation and HANG drywall.

Progress...

Into 2009 we go...

LD smooth coating old gross texture...


Liesl scraping a bedroom ceiling (yes it really did look a bit like the moon)



I had the week between Christmas and New years off of work to keep plugging away at the house. The flu hit right about Christmas so I had to lay low for a few days before getting back to it. My goal was to get as far as possible on replacing the plumbing and hang dry wall in the kitchen.

Well thanks to 'Arctic Blast 2008' the electrical work was pushed back 2 weeks and we hadn't passed our inspection to be able to cover the wires... so the was no dry wall hanging.

I got some great help from my buddies Forrest and Ben during the middle of the week and they helped skim coat and paint the bed room ceilings. Liesl bought the bed room paint and as soon as it is up the bed rooms are done! We also worked on smoothing out the living room ceiling and prepping the box beams for primer.

By the middle of my week off I finally hit stride and made nice progress each day.

After Christmas... before New Year...

This is a view into the dining room from the living room. The far wall has an alcove with a leaded glass window and was covered with 70's paneling when we bought the place. This space has provided much inspiration through the beginning of our work on the house. It was (and will be again!) a built-in buffet on the side of the dining room. In the attic found the original 7 'beveled mirror that hung horizontally above the buffet top...


The first thing I saw when I walked in this house that made me want it was the box beam ceilings. As you can see they are in the living room and dining room. This week we have been working on cleaning them up and prepping for paint. As in the bed rooms there was thick layer of 'decorative texture' that had to be scraped off the ceiling between the beams.

The opening on the far wall is where the french doors (the originals were in the basement!) will be hung again. Thanks to Liz Deck's under-the-floor trim detective work we discovered there was once an opening wide enough for two doors side by side. A few swipes with a Sawzall opened up to find the double header in place and an incredible flow from the box beam ceiling, to the doors, to the back room.


Our great friend Britt Kummer has helped us come up with a fantastic use of space in the kitchen! The back of the kitchen leads upstairs and is slated to be home to the fridge (right), pantry (left behind small wall), and more counter space (left foreground). Where the window is on the left used to be a half bath, then it became a laundry room... and now we are happy to have the natural light in the back of the kitchen.
This is a view of the kitchen looking toward the dining room. At this point the electrical is almost all the way roughed in and you can see we are ready to put some insulation up in those exterior walls (though it would have been nice if that happened before Arctic Blast 2008!). As always Alistair is assuming his role as 'The Supervisor'...