Sheet Rocks!

Sometimes you are money ahead by paying the pros to do their job quickly and efficiently. We decided to sub out the insulation and sheetrock. We could do both jobs ourselves, but insulation is just about the ugliest job..ok the second ugliest job. The ugliest job is crawling under the house to fix a sewage leak...but I digress.

Two guys showed up to insulate the downstairs garage and upstairs apartment. It's summer here, and while summers are normally mild, we are currently having the worst heatwave in recorded history. They went right to work. Wearing sweatshirts taped at the wrists, beanies, dust masks and goodness knows what else, they worked like madmen all day. They finished the whole thing in one day. Amazing.

The first thing I noticed was the difference in sound. Sounds are softer, and it doesn't sound like you're talking in a warehouse. Because the walls are more defined I also get a sudden sense of the actual size of the rooms.

Chuck-the-Building-Inspector came out and gave everything the seal of approval, and we called the sheetrock guy and gave him the go-ahead.

Three hours later, a big crane truck arrived in the driveway with a load of sheetrock.

"Gosh," I thought to myself, "I hope they know there aren't any stairs to the upstairs part."

No worries. Two guys jump out of the truck and run up the ladder into the apartment. The truck driver gets out and gets up into a jumpseat for the crane and starts pushing buttons faster than a 12 year old boy with a video game.

He scoops up a big stack of sheetrock and swings it over to the window opening and takes it right up to the very edge. Then the two guys inside start hauling the 12' long pieces of sheetrock inside and stack it up. Twenty minutes later, they were all done and gone.

Monday morning bright and early two more guys show up to start putting up sheetrock. Within 3 minutes of the truck pulling in, they are slapping that stuff up and screwing it into the studs like nobody's business.

Now it's hot...really hot..Monday hit 103 and muggy, and yesterday was 106, a record. Those two guys worked like demons the whole time.
But it's all done. The garage looks so good, even before it's taped, that it'll kill me to park the car in there.

The upstairs has been transformed. The sheetrock on the barrel ceiling makes the room. It didn't come out clearly in the picture, but when you stand at the entry door, there is a sweeping sense of openness and space..even waves, because the barrel sweeps from west to east.

Now don't think Ed was sitting the shade sipping a cool beverage while this was going on. Oh no! That's my job! No, he was out on the roof, in the sun, which put the temperature where he was working at about.... oh,,, 110? getting shingles in those teeeeny corners. No big deal..it's a small space to get done, right? Guess again. There is nothing to stand on except searingly hot shingles that are melting. He's balancing at an angle on a steeply pitched roof. Each shingle has to be measured, cut, and nailed, all without dropping a tool, raising blisters on asphalt, or falling off the roof. By the second day he made a board to lay over the shingles for footing. The board was covered with heavy plastic liner fabric so it would reduce slipping. Did I mention heat stroke? It was a brutal day..actually three days. My guess is..he was ready to go back to his day job.