This has very little to do with the house, but it is a project that I’ve been working on for awhile. A month or so ago we got an LCD TV with a built-in HDTV tuner. To condense a very long story down, I’ve become enlightened as to how great over-the-air (OTA) HD is. If you are capable of getting a decent enough signal (which is actually less stringent than regular analog TV), you can get a perfect quality TV signal for free. Luckily, we live less than 5 miles from the TV transmitters up in Portland’s west hills, so signal is no problem. I could almost get it working with a set-top antenna, but there would always be one channel that wouldn’t come in. And once I fiddled with it enough to get it in, another one would drop off.

I then tried moving the little antenna up into an attic cavity and snaking a coax cable down into the basement to connect to my “structured media center,” which is basically a fancy name for an overpriced, metal box. That worked surprisingly well, but it wasn’t perfect. Today I picked up this little beauty from Radio Shack for about $25. It looks like some sort of death ray, but it’s actually just a UHF antenna. Fortunately, in the Portland area, all the HDTV channels are in the UHF band, so I didn’t have to mess with a bulky VHF antenna. Right now it’s just resting on the insulation, and I’ll get back to it later to get it more properly mounted. Well, the big question, is how does it work? Simply put, it rocks! The reception is bulletproof. I am calling Comcast tomorrow to drop the cable…

After a partial day on Saturday and some work this morning, our drywall was officially declared finished. We are really impressed with the quality of the work, and the only imperfections that we can find are very minor. Definitely nothing big enough to complain about. We’re going to prime it next weekend and then see how it looks.

We have really been happy with our drywall contractor, Rueben Cortez. Continue Reading »

One of the guys showed up for a bit on Saturday, and there were a couple here today. There’s hardly any point in showing new pictures, but at least they’re more interesting (maybe) than reading “it looks about the same as it did a couple of days ago.” At the very least, it makes us feel like more progress is being made. The funny thing about that is that tomorrow will only be the two week mark from when the project started. Yes, it could have gone faster if they were dedicated to it every day, but so what?? I just have to think of where we’d be without the drywallers. Hmmm…let me think about that for a second… Continue Reading »

Today they went from the lone taper to a crew of four. As you’d imagine, things are really starting to look better. Almost every joint has tape now, and the closets now have tape and mud in them. Also, the couple of problem areas I identified have been rehung, so we’re pretty happy. A few more days of mudding and sanding should finish things up!

I’m not including any pictures today, because they’d look pretty much the same as day 4’s.  There was only guy working today (and he didn’t start till 1pm), so there hasn’t been a huge amount of progress.  The good news, of course, is that every little bit moves us closer to being done.

After being MIA for 3 days, our drywall contractor finally got his taping crew over to our house today. I don’t want to sound like I’m complaining, because I’m not. However, the few times that we have hired outside help, the lack of communication has been the tie that binds them all together. Even the better ones, like this guy. He does actually show up on the days that he says he will, but the time will be a total mystery. They didn’t start until Continue Reading »

By last night all the drywall was hung, and all the mess was cleaned up.

Main room:

Chloe checking out her (future) baby sister’s room, and the view looking back towards the main room:

In the main room, looking through the hall towards Chloe’s room.  The new bathroom is on the right:

They didn’t quite meet their goal of hanging it all in one day, but they came really close. Being a slow drywaller myself, it’s impressive to me to see two guys accomplish so much in only a day…

The contractor had said that he “might” start on Tuesday, and thankfully, he did. We had a beautiful, sunny day in the 60’s, which is pretty rare in Portland in the spring. This was pretty much the ideal day to be hoisting drywall up through our patio cover and in through the window. It would have been a real mess if it’d been raining. Four guys brought up 85 sheets in less than two hours, which is really, really impressive. This picture is of one of the three stacks sitting up there right now. They’re going to be back at 8 AM to start hanging it!  By the way, if you haven’t been in our upstairs, the drywall should give you a good idea of how short the ceiling is and why it was so worth the effort to spend nearly a week raising the ceiling by only 3″
Chloe is really excited about her room, and she wanted to come up with me tonight to take pictures of it…

We got a new bid from a good contractor for $800 less than the first one.  Given that they could also start within a few days instead of close to a month, the choice was easy.  Because our other bids didn’t pan out (one guy never got back to us and the other bowed out because he worked by himself), we decided to just move forward instead of wasting more time.  It looks as though they’ll start the hanging within a day or two!

This weekend I cleared out all the tools and remaining materials so that they’d have space to work.  I also went ahead and cut a hole in our patio cover and added plywood to make a standing/walking surface.  My initial plan of gracefully removing the panel in order to be able to reinstall it did not pan out.  The nails wouldn’t budge, so plan B was to rip it to shreds.  They’ll have to start with the “fun” job of lifting bunches of sheets through the slot and feeding them into the back bedroom through the window hole.  And that’s after carrying them up our front stairs and all the way to the back of the house. An elevated lot is a major pain.