I know it’s been over a week since we last posted about the massive bedroom renovations/makeovers that are going on in our home. We may have been el silento (like my made up Spanish word?) in the last week but that doesn’t mean that we haven’t been busy reassembling the space. Not too long ago, when we last left off, the rooms looked something like this:
Completely gutted out. You can read all about the demolition back here. Well, we’ve started sheet rocking and insulating.
Remember back when we announced this project that one of the primary reasons for the gut job of the two rooms was to properly insulate. A few of our exterior walls were short on insulation, which is typical of old homes in our area. This left us with two very cold bedrooms in the blustery winters here in Maine. Shortly after demolition we brought home a few baffles of insulation.
We used fiberglass, R-15 for the walls and R-19 for the ceiling. Why two insulation ratings? Well, R-19 would be preferable. You see, the higher the R-value the more heat the insulation keeps in. With fiberglass insulation, as you increase the R-value you also increase the thickness of the material. Because we have an old home with old studs, the exterior wall studs weren’t thick enough for the R-19 insulation. R-15 was the highest we could go without re-studding the entire space.
While our heads were spinning around R-values our hands were busy removing nails…..lots and lots of nails.
After demolition, every piece of strapping was loaded with nails. So many nails. Just think, each piece of lathe that we ripped down had a pair of nails attaching it to each piece of strapping. That’s alot of nails. Colby keeps saying that he’s glad he wasn’t the one who had to pound in all those nails! Armed with my pink hammer, I pulled down as many of those nails as I could reach while Colby hung the sheetrock.
And speaking of sheetrock (technically drywall since Sheetrock is actually a brand…I just learned that tonight!). We used the ultra light version of the material, meaning Colby could more easily lug the sheets up the ladder and through the window. It sounds like a tricky maneuver, this sheetrock lugging, but it’s much easier than trying to lug the sheets through the house and up a twisting staircase.
While we decided not to re-stud all the exterior walls, we did put new studs up between the two bedrooms.
The old wall between the two rooms wasn’t load bearing, so we could remove it. Removing the wall made demolition easier, opening up the two small rooms to each other. And the new wall is much more structurally sound than the old one…hmmm…better able to support our awesome wall to wall closet?! Perhaps! Oh….and Goose helped us hang the drywall.
He’s such a good helper Goose and doesn’t get in the way at all (note the sarcasm)! And thanks to all that Goose help, we now have a pair of rooms that actually look somewhat like rooms again.
Technically, the sheetrock portion of the program is yet to be complete. We’re about one sheet shy of done. Maybe we should have gotten 23 sheets instead of 22…curses. But it’s close enough to done that we’ve moved our clothes back into the guest room for storage.
Finally, we don’t have all our clothes and our bed jammed into one tiny, tiny room.
So the game plan from here on out kind of looks like this:
- Store everything in the guest room so we can concentrate on finishing the master bedroom first.
- And by finishing, I mean make it livable again (mud/sand the drywall, prime/paint, light fixture, maybe some window trim).
- Then move back into the master bedroom.
- Move guest room items into the craft room (where we’ve been holding the bed hostage).
- Make the guest bedroom livable again…just in time for operation “Get Married”
We’re really not anticipating being able to completely finish the rooms before our wedding in August. If we do, we do, but if we don’t make it, no big deal. We’re just going to keep puttering along inching towards creating those awesome spaces outlined in the master bedroom mood board and the guest bedroom mood board.
Pssst…Holy raining batman! Anyone else getting dumped on with some serious rain?! We just started the mudding process up in the master bedroom and boy is it drying sloooooooooow! Oh well…I guess that just means we’ll have to put sanding the joint compound off for another day! Awww shucks (note the SERIOUS sarcasm)!
