In our last post, the last photo we sowed was this one:
A rather big pile of screed still in that photo and we didn’t actually use up all the cement…the overage pile was a bit smaller in the end but it was still quite a decent amount that we just couldn’t use. Since we wanted to get the screed as close to the guest house as possible, we didn’t have a container here anymore so we had to get a new one delivered before we could dispose of the overage. We could have put it in our compost pile hole on the courtyard but it’s still full of manure and compost which we also have to figure out what to do with. But once we have gotten all that out of there, we intend to fill the hole (supposedly about 5-6 feet deep and almost 2 meters by 2 meters square around) so naturally dropping all this in there would be useful…but oh well. Maybe at some point we can just test the compost and see if we can’t use it in our garden after all. Unfortunately it’s full of bird nitrates so we’d almost definitely need to treat it before dumping it on the garden. Then of course there would be the haul from our courtyard through the barn and into the garden which wouldn’t smell so nice…but I digress.
Back to the guest house…and the pile of concrete. We were just hoping the pile in the driveway would stay moist until we could get another trash container here and dump it all in there. And we were mostly successful in the end. A new container arrived Tuesday afternoon and the disposal process took us about an hour. It would have moved along much faster if the dog hadn’t been running around on the pile of cement (it was covered in plastic so she mostly just managed to compact it – and dug a few holes in there too, of course) but we still had to take a pick-ax to it and break the soft cement back down into little pieces. Perhaps if we’d gathered all our neighbors together from our half of town, we would have been able to just pick up the cement and dump it as one clump…but that was just not an option for us here.
So yesterday we could finally walk on the floor and we’ve got a strict deadline for this project (we have to finish up by December 19th because Stefan’s parents are coming and they’ll be the first guests staying there) so we had to keep on keeping on. So we started sanding down the drywall spackling. Covey, our drywall guy, was not exactly as clean as he’d promised to be so we were cursing him most of the we were sanding the walls. It’s definitely not a fun job but we certainly can’t just paint everything as it stands now. Unfortunately our few hours of work yesterday were not enough to finish everything so we have more sanding in our future today.
I mentioned how bad the walls in the closet look the other day but didn’t have any good sample photos…but now I do.
The roughness doesn’t show up extremely clear but it’s just not good. But we’ll focus on getting the bathroom walls smoothed out first since we’ll paint those in the next day or two, then tile the shower walls…and then move on to tiling the floor because we can’t lay the wood flooring for another week or so until the screed has dried out a bit more.
Lots more work to be done to say the least but we are definitely closing on the finish line and things are starting to look much better in there. The electrician is here again today to lay more cables and plugs in our future mud room and hopefully get a few more of the lights working again in the barn. We are having him rewire everything back there and change out the fuse boxes as well. All the wiring is old enough to be a fire hazard and since he’s already doing a lot of work here, we might as well get the dirt and dust over with now so we are prepared to start new projects (yeah, like we need those lol). Speaking of new projects, we’re thinking of just going forward with the mudroom project now too. We’ve decided to skip drywalling everything and probably will skip screeding the floor too. Instead we’ll just spackle over the new cables the electrician is laying and then cover the brick wall that divides off the kitchen and call things done.
So enough writing about things…we’ve got work to do 🙂
