649 6th

corn

It's Thursday night and of course for me that means trucking down to home depot to push back a 5 gallon bucket of drywall compound on the hand truck. On the one hand I am so happy that the depot is only about a 20min walk away. Pushing stuff back up the hill (and it is uphill the entire way) can sometimes be a drag. But, as I am not the one feathering the layers as we speak I think it was a fair trade-off.

I read in Michael Polan's book "Omnivores Dilemma" that corn was in everything, including drywall compound. I of course took this as the gospel since it was in print after all. As I was slogging the bucket uphill I got to thinking, "is that true? Exactly what is in drywall compound?" I just read through the ingredients on the bucket and they go a little something like this:

limestone, dolomite, or gypsum
water
mica
vinyl acetate polymer
attapulgite

may contain:
talc
pyrophylite

Now you may wonder why a manufacturer might say "this, this, or this" ingredient. It's less that they don't know at any given moment and more that they use whatever is the cheapest at the time. Rather the constantly reprint labels they just list anything they might use from time to time. This holds true for the manufactured food you eat too. As for the ones listed as "may" these ingrefients are usually reserved for those that act as binding agents (or some such) for the main ingredients that vary given the market price.

Now if your curious mind made you click on each of the ingredients above you will quickly realize that wikipedia (yes I trust it almost 100% these days) says that none of them is corn (hopefully some of you knew that without clicking as well). I would be willing to bet that I have told no less than... oh...100 people that drywall compound has corn in it since I read that book a year or so ago. I'm sure there must be some out there that use some corn starch binder but suffice it to say, I won't think "pot of grits" next time I walk by the stuff at the depot.

mudman

make that one thing

The plumber finally came, and went, and if you keep your fingers crossed, he may come again. Seriously, plumbers have a REALLY bad reputation much to my delight ours broke that mold. I was all set to do battle but there was none to be had, reasonable, punctual, a really nice guy.  Plumbing was one of two things that's on the list of things we don't do ourselves.

He roughed in the new kitchen feeds and drain where it needed to go. The only down side to it was he had to take away the old plumbing. Meaning the 2x4-hillbilly-beer-bong that I had rigged up in the kitchen as a sink is now sadly gone <cough>.  Meaning, we have no kitchen sink... again. The good news is the only thing that we are waiting for is ourselves. The plumber was the only hurdle to get over and then the rest was us.

Of course that hadn't always been the case. After the plumber came we were then going to bring in the drywall finish guy we've used a couple of times immediately ther after. Thus bringing us to the other item on the list of things we don't do ourselves. Turns out we couldn't get in touch with him and we needed to get this done to stay on schedule.

I say "on schedule" like there's some sort of client deadline I have to meet. The truth of the matter is Michael's family is coming to visit the second weekend in February and we know where we'd like the kitchen to be (not that it would be a hassle for them either way). We've used the little deadlines in the past to get a big flurry of stuff done why should this time be any different.

<non sequitur>Lately I've begun to pretend that I am a project manager on a design/build job when I talk to anbody about supplies or fixtures. Somehow if I pretend there's some vague "other" out there I'm trying to please they give me a lot less hassle and a lot better advice. Or, it allows me yet another fantasy diversion to play around in for a moment. </non sequitur>

To stay on schedule we needed the work to get done this week so we can tile next weekend. Mark another one off the list of things we don't do. We're taping and sealing the walls. The photo you see is after the base "tape" coat. There will be two more, fill and feather, after that it will be primed. I'm always amazed at how shockingly bad it looks after the first coat. So far I think our work is on par with the the guy we normally use. We'll see when we get a little later in the week if I'm singing the same tune.

Both of us have done finish drywall work before but, as it is one of those things that is a touch skill thing, something neither of us particularly wanted to whet back into shape. After a few hours of installing and filling corner bead, I gotta say, it's not that bad. I kinda like it. Micahel on the other hand is the master of the seam, has technique is so strong that he earn's the right to do the two remaining coats as a solo performance... ok that was blatantly Tom Sawyer'y of me.

The plan is to do a step a night this week so that by the weekend we can begin to paint and tile. I have a little time lapse sequence I'm planning in my head. Here's hoping it will make it to the animated gif I want it to be.

brick sealant

We sealed the brick today. Oddly enough, motivation came by way of lighting. Plug modeling was installed ages ago with three outlets per "bay", but for the longest time we've only had a single halogen flood on each side. Something about finishing the drywall the comes up out of the stairwell prompted Toby to plug both lights in on one side and the difference was (to use a cliche) like a light coming on. And now the halogen high-hats that are in the soffit on opposite wall don't seem to off-balance the room. It's almost like we knew what we were doing all along.

But it's not like the additional light suddenly made us realize what a dingy mess the cobbed brick wall has been. Truth is we've done just about all the kitchen work we can until plumber does his thing, so we're sort of casting about for small projects and tying up lose ends. Before sealing the brick, we needed to fill a few spots where the old mortar had fallen out and crumbled to dust on our floor ever since we exposed the brick work. Read on a home reno site about someone using a cake decorating bag to grout a faux brick wall in order to minimize the amount of mortar that winds up on brick faces, which seemed like a pretty good solution for all the little cracks I wanted to fill. Then at HomeDepot we found an all-in-one bag of mortar; just add water, squish it around, tear it open and apply with included plastic trowel. We mixed it a little thinner than suggested, snipped a corner of the bag, and started squeezing.

Next day, it was ready to seal. We've been waffling over whether to seal the brick at all because we've both seen too many glossy brick walls and wanted to preserve as raw an appearance as possible while still minimizing the slow, dusty decay. Also trying to cut down on our consumption of VOC's. Once again, a pursual of the internet provided solution: diluted Elmer's glue! (What's less toxic than that?) Thanks to pressurized spray pump (another bright internet idea) application was remarkably easy.

Don't know how well the difference makes itself known in these pictures, but from where I'm sitting (about three feet away) it looks almost clean enough to eat off of.

show us some leg

slowly but surely the kitchen cabinets are coming together. we glued up the last of them this weekend. now the carcasses are basically done. they have a water based poly seal and primer on all surfaces, and the legs have been installed. we have the drawer slider hardware that I'm hoping we can check off weeknights this week.

beyond that it's only counter tops (ordering from bettencourt this week, they claim they can get what we need in a couple of days), drawers, faces, and paint. I realize I say *only* but, in the grand scheme I think the bulk is behind us (unless we get a sudden urge to dovetail all of the drawers!).

waning bane

we got a few steps closer to being done with drywall today. the bottom of the stairs and the side walls are now done; as is all drywall on the second floor(!).

I particularly like the transition detail. we used the same j trim used on the galvalum siding on the back of the house to cap the sheetrock. we sandwiched (and nailed) a piece of poplar between that and the brick.

as expected the most difficult part of this job was finding a flat surface to screw into and getting the drywall wedged behind the stair stringer. neither turned out to be that difficult just really fussy and time consuming.