Building: Week 11

No more skeletons in our house. Last Thursday all our drywall was installed. IN ONE DAY! It usually takes a few days to do the entire house but because there is so little work for construction in Payson the drywall company had plenty of people to install the drywall. It was such a weird feeling to walk in to the house through the garage door and not be able to see all the way to the back of the house. I was a little disoriented at first. It looks so different with the walls up. After the disorientation wore off my excitement grew leaps and bounds because it looks more like a house now on the inside too.

This is one of the kid's rooms.

This is the half wall around the stairs being prepped for rounded corners. In the back is the master bedroom.

This is the entry area looking out from the living room.

This is the kitchen with pantry.

This is the family/dining room.

Here is the inside of the garage. Just a note about this door going from the garage out to the yard...it was a HUGE pain to install. CJ worked for 3 hours one day prepping the doorway that had many problems, then it took me 2 1/2 hours the next day to hang the door...with the help of the Supervisor. He said that this was the worst door to install in the history of doors. It's such a good thing that the drywall covers all the problems that we had with the door.

Lest anyone think that I don't do any real work on the build, CJ got a picture of me using a power tool.

Power tools have been my struggle in this project. I especially hate the nail gun. I have a real fear of impaling someone with a nail (or worse, many nails). I tried to avoid jobs that needed power tools as much as possible. The supervisor decided that I needed to get over my fears so he has made it his mission to make sure that I get jobs using all the tools. I am getting better at using the tools. They are still scary but I am not letting the fear get the best of me. The only thing I won't ever be able to do is attach or un-attach the air guns. There is a fear there that goes waaaay to deep. It is just like popping a balloon and I absolutely can't do that...but that's another story. Anyway, we usually get some BYU students from the Early Education department come to volunteer on our project. They need volunteer hours and we need little things done so that we can focus on the major stuff. This Saturday was a big surprise though. We got twice the number of volunteers from the EE department and another large group of Construction Management Supervisor students as well. We probably had 40 volunteers on Saturday.

All but one of the people in this pic are volunteers and this is only half the volunteers. The CMS students are on the roof and the EE students are laying out the trusses. This is major work that needed to be done and it was great to have their help. The trusses had to be layed out because we had the crane coming to set the trusses on the roof of the fourth house that afternoon and we still had lots to do before the crane came. The crane got there and CJ came up to me and asked if I wanted to be a "hooker" today. You can imagine the confusion on my face because he was totally serious. I made a few jokes before he told me what the job of the hooker is (and it has nothing to do with walking the streets. lol) The hooker is the person that hooks the trusses to the crane to be lifted on the house. I accepted the job and went to work as a hooker. Being that I was the first female hooker on the build CJ is now known as my pimp. We had a long day on Saturday but it was fun as well and there was a lot of work accomplished.