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Monday, October 13, 2014

We’re building a home, not a house.


When we started building, we planned on doing almost everything ourselves. We never approached this build as “we’re building a house to live in.” We approached it as, “We’re building our family a home.” There’s a huge difference in connotation there.

We hired out the concrete pad, which is ironic because Colt’s family used to own a concrete company and he’s been around it his whole life. (Maybe that’s why we hired it out, as he knows it’s a skilled trade, not something someone just “picks up.”)

We did the framing. We did the house wrap. We did the insulation. We did the electrical, and the plumbing. (All to code, I might add.)

But one thing we had always planned on hiring out was our drywall.


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We’re just a couple months away from calling the house move-in-ready (which does NOT mean completed, just roughing it with a three-year-old ready).  And I guess we could easily just call a local company and say, “Drywall, please!”  But after building this place from the ground up, we hesitated.

For one thing, $1000 is a HUGE amount of money to us these days.  I know people easily just toss around 1000 bucks here or there when they’re renovating their home, but when you’ve done it all yourself, with no labor costs, $1000 for labor seems astronomical. 

Do you know how many two-bys $1000 can buy?

How about how much insulation?

Better yet, do you know how much drywall you can buy for $1000?

$1000 covers the cost of all our drywall. For the entire house.

So the idea of doubling that cost, just for labor, didn’t strike me as a great decision.

Sure, would it be money well spent? Absolutely.

Would our drywall look amazing?  It better. lol

Would it be done in a matter of days?  Yes.

And let’s be honest. We’ve built an ENTIRE HOUSE on our own. Surely we can learn how to do drywall too. We BUILT A HOUSE. It may take longer, but I have no doubt we can figure it out.
So yeah, we’re not hiring it out. We’re working on it a little at a time, ourselves. And learning along the way.

Here’s what we got done this weekend…

This is the kitchen—Colt finished hanging the drywall over the pantry wall this weekend, and I got started mudding that wall, putting a second coat onto the center wall, and sanding the wall on the far left (between weekends and different days, each of the walls was at a different stage).

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Below is a photo of the pantry wall looking straight at it. The drywall is hiding the pocket door we installed a few weeks ago.

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Just for a reminder, the wall looked like this last weekend:


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From there, Colt (with Uncle Billy assisting on Saturday) moved into the bathroom hanging drywall.

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Here’s after I taped all the seams and covered the screw holes.


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Because we designed our home to have exposed posts, we won’t have any corners in our drywall (with the exception of closets and a few in the upstairs bedrooms). Instead, we’re trimming out our structural posts with stained wood that will be exposed when complete.


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Lastly, here’s a view of the one completed wall in the kitchen. It’s super smooth, with no blemishes visually or to the touch. I want to paint it so. badly.


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But alas, I’m trying to hold off, as doing one wall in the entire house seems silly, especially because I have sanding to do on all the adjacent walls in the kitchen.

In other news, Granny’s visiting this week, so Wyatt is pretty much in Heaven.




MrsG

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