Our shell has skin!

Yesterday was very exciting. It was the day in which our house finally started taking shape and looking like an actual house where actual people might actually live. Rolando and Gabe brought over their crew of 7 and all the drywall was hung in less than 10 hours... amazing! I'll never forget this day for the rest of my life. The day that our shell turned into a house. Of course, none of it would have been possible if not for the wonderful skeleton provided by Ray, Tony, Kevin, Josh and crew. Great work, guys! We're in the home stretch now!

And now, a few pictures:

quite the nice effect.. I should have asked them to leave it like this.

working on the skylight walls.

a little before:


and after:

Rolando the drywall master on his magical stilts.

the 3rd floor in most of it's glory. look, ma! no walls!

our entryway closet. perfect for all of your coat, glove, hat, key, cell phone charger, mail, and dog leash needs.

the kitchen is starting to take shape!

and in other non drywall-related news: this man is repointing our bricks. repointing basically means "making them look nice and purty"

The drywall should be ready for priming and painting in a week or two. Soon after we should be seeing some tile and windows. Exciting!

DRYWALL!

Yes! We have it! LOTS of it! ALL of it! It's UTTERLY amazing! Pictures forthcoming....

Stairs and More Stairs!

This is what Ray looks like after a few hours of sawing through bricks:

All of that reddish stuff on him is brick dust. It was quite a spectacle.

This is Ray and Tony. Tony has not been sawing brick, but has been sawing wood:


Here are those fabulous new concrete stairs we were bragging about the other day:


And here is Sean's latest masterpiece, the lighted stairway (queue the "oohs" and "aahs"):

The view as you're walking down the stairs:


And the view from the living room:

The plan is to install white acrylic toe kicks on these stairs, thereby making the glow fairly uniform across the entire underside of each step. Sean is not quite done with this project, but it's looking fantastic already!

Might as well post some old pictures...we have thousands!

This is a more current photo of the front of the house from the street:


I know it still looks pretty crappy, but if you compare with the photo from a previous post, you'll notice major improvements to the left (a full rehab, though not of the best quality), and some improvement to the right (come on, Rem!).

And here are our beautiful marble steps - we don't know how we're going to fix the cracked one on the bottom:


Speaking of Rem, here he is (he owns the house to the right of our place):


And this is Sean, using a strange pneumatic tool thingie to scrape the disgusting stuff off of our basement walls:

The photo is a bit hazy because of all of the dust that he's kicking up...washing all of this stuff out of the basement is how he became the scary monster-man below.

This is our drawing of the entry way bench/storage area thing we built to solve a construction problem near the front door:

And now, the man that makes it all possible...our General Contractor, Ray:


I have never seen him without that cheek full of chewing tobacco. It's a little scary, actually. Luckily, he is a SUPER nice guy!

New concrete stairs!

Excitingly, we have brand spankin' new concrete stairs leading to our basement! Unfortunately, since Sean is not here, I can't post pictures of them. You see, in our household, Sean is in charge of all the plugs, wires, and electronic-a. Because he isn't here, I am without the appropriate wire, and therefore, incapable of uploading new pictures from the camera. This is a sad thing. I miss him!

Some photos from the Peak Auction

A mini-contractor peruses the stacks of laminate flooring with his dad:

Boxes of hardwood flooring as far as the eye can see:

Some random travertine, our notes, and the ever-present tape measure:

Piles of tiles, most of which are made in China, where Sean went less than 24 hours after this little outing.

Here's Sean, on the phone with our foreman, getting some last minute measurement confirmation. That's our master bath tile in the foreground:

Sean getting ready to do some bidding:

Forgive the poor quality, but these videos should give you a decent idea of what's going on here:

Kitchen plans...

Let me show you Sean's handiwork in the form of a partial kitchen mock up:


Pretty cool, huh??

Sean is blogging from China:

Check out his blog here!

You know you're in Baltimore when...

....you find an empty bag of "Utz Crab Chips" laying around your construction site:

If you've never had/seen crab chips, your kidneys and heart thank you. Contrary to the clever labeling, they do not contain any crab. They are, like many lackluster crabs, completely coated in Old Bay. I am not even sure if you can get this product outside of the greater Baltimore area. I think it's what the average Baltimorean eats in the dead of winter to remind himself that somewhere in the not too distant, summery future, there's a seat at a newspaper-and-crustacean-covered picnic table with his name on it! Sadly, if the pillaging of the Chesapeake Bay continues, Crab Chips are as close as anyone is going to get to tasting the real deal; the sweet, delicate, delicious flesh of the Maryland Blue Crab.

Anyhoo....

In other news, we're digging a big hole:



Hopefully, this hole will someday accommodate our brand spankin' new basement stairs (complete with low rise and long run for Sean's ease of schlepping). Rumor has it that concrete will be poured this week.

Here is Sean doing some low-voltage installation:


He has worked incredibly hard on running (literally) THOUSANDS of feet of wires/cables that will make our home the "house of the future...today!" Intercoms and cable and cameras, HURRAH! The working conditions in the house are somewhat horrendous, as we have no windows or doors - just plywood coverings - and it has been below thirty degrees all week. I so appreciate his hard work, but wish he didn't have to suffer through it as he did. All told, his efforts saved us a ton of cash, so hopefully, it will all be worth it.

Speaking of the end, we're not nearly there. As a matter of fact, here is what our interior looks like after two and a half months of work:



That ladder is standing in our "kitchen." This process is somewhat frustrating because, turns out, there's a lot of stuff in your house that you don't know about (unless you're a general contractor), and all of that stuff takes an inordinate amount of time to install. Framing, plumbing, electrical, low-voltage...all of those things need to be done before insulation can even go in and drywall goes up. The builder's rule of thumb (to turn an awful phrase) is that you can move in 60-90 days after your drywall is up. Speaking of insulation, we have some...and by some, I mean this much:



If you want an idea of the scale of this pile, each of those rolls is about three feet in diameter. The punchline is that whoever threw this pile haphazardly into the house had to take it right back out because the inspector demanded a higher grade of insulation. Ha. Ha.

This morning, Sean left for his week of pre-olympic training in Beijing. He's going to try hard to resist the temptations of injecting human growth hormone since doping at the Olympics can cause an international incident. But I really think the javelin is going to be his big event this year. Just kidding - he's going to be sitting in a hotel conference room with a bunch of broadcasting equipment and pasty, office dwelling tech-geeks, learning how to run the network that is going to bring the Olympics out of Communist China, directly to you on your couch!

Before he went, we traipsed off to the Peak Auction. This was a TREMENDOUS experience, both for our building materials and for the unbelievable people watching. The per capita rate of sausage consumption at this event averaged at least triple what the American Heart Association recommends for a whole year.

I'll try to post about that outing tomorrow, once I am assured that our GC has retrieved the two pallets of tile Sean aptly procured for half the market price!