Saved the best for last...drywall is done!

This is when things started to get real. We've used Tino and his crew for drywall before, when Curt finished the basement in our last house about three years ago. He hung all that drywall himself but Tino finished and textured it. Tino's guys have been at our house for about three weeks and they finished the texturing today. They have been there on the last few weekends when we have been working and they are polite, don't speak any English and play extremely loud but cheerful music. They brought two microwaves and a plug-in hot plate to our house, and one of the microwaves in the basement is filled with rocks. Not sure why. Our porta potty has taken a hit with all the extra use but this is probably our last weekend dealing with that...hallelujah. $23,000 later, we have real walls!

This guy walked down our stairs on those stilts more smoothly than I do on my own two feet 

No big deal

Here you can see they started adding the hand-scraped texture 

Just starting the texture in the kitchen...and those are the bases for our cabinets! 

Just taped, not textured yet

The wall on the upper far right is where Curt will put a future door to this loft/library area

Front of the House

When we go up to the house Sunday and Monday, it will be our fourth and hopefully last weekend in a row working on the rock wall surrounding our garage doors. First, wire mesh had to be nailed to the foam concrete forms all around the doors. Then the mesh had to be scratch-coated with a layer of mortar that was left with grooves in it. Then we started laying rocks with more mortar. Each of the last three weekends, we've been interrupted in this process with one snowy day, so it's taken a bit longer than we thought. But it looks pretty good! Curt, Sam and JJ did the mesh and scratch coat and I have put up most of the rock. You can see where Curt put up his rocks though because he went horizontally and I did a lot of vertical mixed in. 


We drove about an hour away to buy these rocks from a guy who had bought them from a business that had gone under. We paid about $2 per square foot compared to $6 or more per square foot retail ($900 total). They looked more gray in the lot, and they looked pretty different piled into the trailer, and they look even more different on the house. Our goal was not to have our siding, window trim, garage doors and stone all be so beige, but here we are. It's not a huge deal to me and at least it looks a little different from all the neighboring houses and cabins. We bought over a ton, maybe two tons, and we'll have plenty left to wrap stone around the bases of our deck pillars (an HOA requirement, just like their requirement for us covering this part of the house with stone also) as well as the small wall containing our back covered patio. 

I got to unload these from our trailer, fun!

Curt did the wall to the left and I did the center, pretty different 

If we ever put stone up like this again, I won't use the pre-made corners because they didn't combine well with the other stone 

I can tell exactly where Curt stopped on the bottom and where I started 

Almost done!

The Mantel!

A few Saturdays ago, we had a guy come over with an Alaskan saw mill to cut some wood from the trunk of the ginormous dead tree that was cut down in our yard in the last summer.

He was able to cut a bunch of flat pieces and a few rounds. I haven’t decided what exactly I’ll do with the rounds yet, maybe some stools, but we were thrilled with the flat pieces.

The rounded top and bottom will possibly become future benches

One piece has already been cut down (size was prescribed by our fireplace, it could only be so wide and deep) and hung as our mantel in the living room. This needed to be mounted before the drywall was put in if we wanted it to be “floating” with no brackets. Curt used some huge bolts to attach this thing to the frame around the fireplace. I bet we could both stand on it.

We're going to use another flat piece as the counter in the powder room with a basin sink on top. We might use one in the kitchen at the end of our peninsula as an eating bar. I want to use one as a ledge on the half wall behind the couch in the living room. Curt also wants to build a big dining table using two flat pieces connected. Luckily we have a bunch of wood to use up!