Home Addition: A slow-moving monster

It has been a long time since I've had a spare couple of hours to sort through photos and post our progress.  We've both been slammed trying to get things ready for various parts of the finish work plus holding down jobs and acting as quasi-general contractors.  No biking for us.

A friend saw what we've been doing and said, "that remodel is a monster." Add to it the pace of the workers lately and it seems to be a slow-moving monster.

The last couple of days we've seen real progress, and I'll post pictures of them in a day or two, but I've got to get you caught up to date. 

Here is the finished product of Drew's one-afternoon AC compressor screening project reported in our last post.  The neighbors hopefully should not mind looking at this.

Also in our last post, the drywall was going up.  It took quite a while and many boxes of mud.

  Ramone here was back a half dozen days to do the mudding.

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But eventually it looked like this. These are stairs going to the upstairs suite.

Here is the master bedroom.

So the 'rock was on, which was great, except when I realized that the blower motors for the fireplaces were missing.  I knew I had seen them sitting on top of the fireplace, behind the framing. Uh oh.

The morning after the sheetrock was up, Drew and I pulled off one piece and sure enough

 the cardboard box containing the motors was still sitting on top of the fireplace.  Can you say fire hazard!!!  We took off the rest of the drywall on both fireplaces to find the insulation hanging down and exposing the exterior wall (can you say not energy efficient!) and an electrical wire touching the flue.  I totally flipped out.  I couldn't even talk to the contractors so I left for work and let Drew straighten things out.  He is much more level-headed in these type of situations than me.  He would make a good airline pilot.

But dang doesn't he make a good construction worker?

This shot was taken at the second building supply place he went to to track down more siding shingles. The wrong ones had been delivered to our house.  See what I mean about being our own General Contractor?  But eventually the siding was put on,

and the decking on the master suite patio is partly on.

To keep an eye on the workers, I find things to do around the house.  Our exterior paint job is not complete (going on 6 years now) because many of the windows are peeling badly, so I removed the old paint off one sill with our heat gun and prepped it for new paint. 

Check out how thick the paint is in this photo below.  The thickness of the metal blade of the paint scraper (right) compares to the paint chip/wedge (left).  That is some thick paint.  Probably 100 years worth. 

So anyway, things were moving slowly along. Some of the trim arrived.

and we picked up the flooring to allow it time to acclimate before installation.

We're getting closer everyday.