the second floor has been a large drywall box for a few months now. to give us a boot in the pants and drive home the point we have a deadline, we scheduled Glenn our drywall guy. he did the finish on the third floor, and he'll be back April 2 to pick up where he left off. the plan is to have all of the remaining finish work to be done in one shot. the amount of dust is staggering and the fewer days we have it around the better.
that means there's a lot of drywall to be hung on weeknights for the next few days. the second floor still has areas of the old-brick-uneven-surfaced walls that need sheeting. we have been putting it off for weeks knowing the shimming for that job is gong to be hideously tedious.
on the first floor it's just about the entire floor less that part we put up to close off the bathroom so our guest could again do their business in private. there is one small hitch on the first floor. I forgot I needed to add a nailer to one of the floor beams to assist in a repair of the flooring above. in one of those %&@#! moments it dawned on me that we would have to uninstall two ceiling panels. nothing makes me more agitated than having to undo. but, like knitting, sometimes you just gotta rip it out and start all over (adding to much salt to a stew is a different story but that's not the metaphor du jour).
in any one of the "not so big" titles that currently make her the Steven King of the home reno world, Sarah Susanka says to try and create activity areas within larger spaces to make them more intimate. one of the ways she suggests doing this is by changing ceiling heights within a room.
in our case we decided to install soffits. on the second floor we needed to break up the space up a bit and we didn't want to install walls. eventually there will be built in shelving that runs with the soffits but doesn't quite reach their height. we hope this approach leaves an open light filled space but one that doesn't simply use the raw space as a giant empty shoe box.
to construct the soffits we made what we have come to call "ladders". you can see from the strip that we fabricated all the ladders for the entire job and then screwed them together before hanging them as a complete unit.
Somehow the cutting and prepping of the ladders claimed two tape measures-- a single day record, in fact the first two ever. I guess when you start assembly lining wood pieces sometimes you forget the order and swing down on the chop saw before moving the tape measure.
for the most part they went together pretty well. personally I think
it's a bit more framing than is needed to hold a bit of dry wall and few light fixtures but, it's not coming down. making this out of standard framing 2x4's had the ever present warped and twisted board challenges but even that got taken care of with a bit of clamping and screwing in the right places.
hopefully the electrician will be here any day and we can seal them up and call them done. we already have the fixtures now all we need is a bit of his time.
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