Author Archives: matt

Yikes, A Spider!

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This morning as I was walking out the door, Lucy stopped me and told me that there was a spider in the doorway to the ‘doghouse’.  I followed her in to see the spider.  She stopped in the middle of her room, got on her hands and knees and put her head near the floor.
I looked at the doorway and saw some old cobwebs in the corner so got close, bent down and peered into the bottom corner.  I didn’t see any spider so I turned to tell Lucy there were only webs and I came within about 3 inches of putting my face into a black widow on her web in the middle of the doorway.  Lucy had been right.  The spider was a couple of inches off the floor, hanging upside down so that its hourglass was very visible.

I took a picture and then squashed the spider with my shoe.

Sorry about the blur.  It didn’t look so blurry on the little screen of my phone…

Bye Bye Beams

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The ceiling of the first floor was kind of confusing.  The plans called for using parallams and 2×12’s to make the floor of the second story.  As I discovered, 2×12 does not mean that the boards are 12 inches wide.  It means that they are anywere from 11 1/4″ to 11 1/2″ wide.  You would think that parallams, being engineered lumber, would actually be the size that they are labeled as.  You would be wrong.  We used several thicknesses of parallams, and they were all supposed to be 12″ wide.  They actually measured out at a consistent 11 7/8″ in width. 

Does any one see the problem? 

If the 2×12’s are attached to the 12″ wide parallams forming a level surface for the top of floor, the bottom of the floor (the ceiling of the first story) is going to be very uneven.  The parallams hung down around 1/2″ below the rest of the ceiling joists.  This does not make for good surface to hang drywall from.

The drywallers ended up butting the drywall up against the beams and then taping / mudding directly on the beams themselves, without any drywall.  You can see the brown beams in the pictures from a previous post.  Here is what the ceilings look like after the extra mud.

 

Max’s Eureka moment

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Last week, when the drywallers put up the first pieces of drywall, some of the ceiling pieces had foot prints on them.  (See pictures in the previous post) Max and Lucy were baffled.  They asked how the workers could walk on the ceiling and the walls.  I told them they must have special boots.

A few days later, on Sunday, as we were looking at the progress, Max told me that he knew how the footprints were on the ceiling.  In a hushed voice, as if to guard state secrets, he said ‘They walk on the pieces when they are on the floor.’  I congratulated him on good thinking. 

I wonder if he had an ‘a-ha!’ moment in the middle of the night when the solution came to him?  Did he sit up in bed and go back to sleep satisfied?

Drywall Hanging Marathon

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The drywallers are flying.  They started Thursday afternoon, worked all day Friday, all day Saturday and are working all day Sunday.  When my job was bid, they hadn’t had work for over 2 months.  Now he is juggling 4 jobs, so they are trying to get all the hours in that they can.