649 6th

stragglers

OK a brief sojourn from the comic pages of late. It appears that the jury is split on this one. Many have chimed in and it usually goes something like "wow, those are fantastic! you've cracked blogging wide open" or "words are nice too."  Yes, we did go a little hog wild over the three day weekend with the comic life ap (it's a mac only application, we are not laying them out by hand) but, it was just enough to motivate to keep the tasks coming at a steady pace.

Right now we are struggling with dependencies and stragglers. The drywall can't be finished until the first floor ceiling is finished. To complicate matters the ceiling of the first floor is the flooring of the second floor. As you can see all of the bad planks have been removed and now we have to cut and fit new ones back in. We didn't want to have one seam running across the flooring to REALLY make it patchy so we staggered the joint across to different beams. Never let it be said that we do it the easy way.

Meanwhile, the dry wall  on the second floor needs to wait till the drywall on the first floor is ready to be installed so that can be done as one job. The framing on the first floor needs to happen before the drywall can be installed. Ditto for the framing of the wall around the stairs on the second.

Separately the third floor finish work is not JUST so it looks good. Without it all of the highly effective ventilation we put in the ceiling is sucking all of the warm air out of the house. The curious thing about finish work is that it's exceedingly time consuming. Cutting, shaping, sanding, staining, lacquering, installing, all of those ing words start to add up after a while.

Don't get me wrong we're still way in it and we do have a plan, sometimes it's nice though when the task options are a bit more scant.

Oh and one last thing bout the comic pages. If you are a blog whore like I am you tend to track your stats. Search engines are really good at deducing content from text to serve up in your google results.  With no text there is no result, posting pictures only does have its traffic affects.

the chisler

in with the old

lazy sunday

three day MLK

out with the new

bathBOOM

the question

Every so often someone will ask me (usually after having gone on about the house ad nauseam) "so, when are you going to be done?" It's not the I hate the question it's just more of a zen koan, there is no answer.

At the rate we are gong and given the amount of work we still have to do (including all of the low priority stuff) it will be years in the making. This isn't to say were going to be living in a construction mess for years to come but once the garden, front railing, green roof, etc., etc. are all installed it may be a year or more out.

When we got home from the holidays in Florida I realized it was all on us. No more excuses about waiting for the contractor to finish his part it was all us. How much to bite off at one time and how fast do you chew? I've mentioned trying to keep some balance between work, house, and having a life before but lately we were getting sort  of "tasked out" and needed  something  to give us focus without necessarily having to come to terms with the full scope of he project.

I think we came up with a pretty reasonable solution. We put together a plan (click to enlarge) that gets us to March 1st. All of the tasks in any particular month (December was included) have the same start and end date meaning that as long as you get all of it done in that month then don't dwell on the pace of any single task.

After looking at the plan in hindsight the unstated goal had to be "be dust free ASAP". The third floor is pretty much there. The second floor needs sheet rock finishing and floor sanding before it's there while the first floor needs to be demoed, framed, sheet rocked, finished and THEN get floor sanded. The first floor is obviously the furthest out. We're trying to catch it up fast so we can do the dry wall finish work (aka dust bomber) and floors (aka return of the dust bomber) all in one shot on both floors.

Yeah I know it may be a bit control freakish for us to map in such a detailed way but, without it's a quagmire of tasks and jobs that can be oh so depressing. There are things we have done that are "off plan" so it's not like it's even all that rigid. However, if we stay to plan lots should be going on over the next few weeks, including a couple of parties! ...stay tuned.