We made an enormous amount of progress today – more than we ever could have imagined!

Macky sent a contractor to us this morning which wrote about earlier…we were a bit concerned because Macky told us during one of our last conversations that it’s not possible for two people to hang drywall, especially on the ceiling. So then he calls this morning and says he’s sending one guy out – and we started to wonder if we’d manage to get much done since we were still rather exhausted from our demolition day yesterday. But this guy was a drywall master and we not only got our ceiling finished in less than two hours but we also got a full wall finished too along with the start of our middle wall between the bathroom and the bedroom. So needless to say we are EXTREMELY happy about today’s progress. So much so that we might even take tomorrow off – which is a good thing since we’re going to dinner at a friend’s house tonight and it’s almost certain to be a VERY long night!

But back to the important stuff. As I said, after about two hours our ceiling was up. The guy scolded us a bit about having some of the profiles turned around backwards on the ceiling, but in the end everything worked out just fine. It seems that most of our problem in getting the drywall up on the ceiling before was because Hagebau, our local improvement store, actually sold us the wrong drywall screws. The screws we bought originally just went right through the drywall and didn’t actually hold it in place. The drywall was so heavy that the screws just tore right through it and the contractor basically told us there was no way we ever would have gotten any full sheets of drywall to hold to the ceiling with them. But the problem was quickly resolved with another quick trip to Hagebau where Stefan and he picked up the right screws (although they tried to sell us the wrong ones again) and from there things when extremely quickly.

Because we finished the ceiling so quickly, we asked the contractor (whose name I won’t attempt to spell correctly but we’re calling him Kovey for short) if he would stick around to help us stud out the walls and hang the drywall. Of course he agreed so we took an hour off for lunch which we all really needed (there was no time for breakfast for any of us) and we also made another stop to Hagebau to pick up more electrical cables and insulation to put behind the drywall on the walls.

Three hours later, the back wall was fully studded out and all but one small panel of drywall was hung. The remaining panel can’t be done until Macky shows up during the week to do the plumbing for the shower, sink and toilet…so we’re really hoping he keeps his word this time and shows up!

Before Kovey left, we also started studding out the divider wall between the bedroom and bathroom. If we’d had more profiles left, we probably could have gotten a bit further but since it was already 5pm anyway, we figured we’d call it quits for the day. During the week we’ll need to take a trip to get more stuff but Kovey will be back again next Saturday (assuming Macky has been here) so we can finish out most of the rest of the drywall.

Today was a pretty eye opening experience for us regarding Macky and his work habits. Apparently quite a bit has changed in the last year and he’s not doing much of the work himself but subcontracting it out to others. I guess in some regard this is better for his customers since Macky himself has become very unreliable. Plus he’s using lower quality people now it seems which really isn’t acceptable. We’ve referred 3 sizable jobs to him since he did the renovation on our house and we’d intended to give him more work in the future…but now it seems that won’t be the case.

We’re even thinking we may manage to get the mud room finished again before Stefan’s vacation is over. Kovey is so good that we should be able to easily get the guest room finished before Thanksgiving and therefore may also now have time to do our mud room too…of course we’re not promising ourselves anything yet but we absolutely have renewed hope and enthusiasm for everything now!