Here's a couple quick shots of the living/dining room; it's starting to look like a house again. And the heat! The heat! It's so warm in there now, and the water temp on the boiler appears to only be somewhere around 105 degrees. This is really going to be interesting to see how this works out. As I'm cleaning up, any spare insulation I find I throw it into the attic. I figure it never hurts to have more insulation up there, especially with all that heat we're generating with electricity. I still haven't heard "Boo" from the insulation sub since he returned from his vacation and after I left a couple messages. I should try him tomorrow just to close the loop. A guy could get a full time job being a Construction Manager for a single family home, I swear.Today, I got the 40 pound demo hammer instead of the 60 pounder, and it made all the difference in the world. I could actually manage it without feeling like I had to do the clean and jerk every time it poked through the slab. It was exhausting. But with the 40 pounder, that the guy said wasn't going to be effective for breaking up a slab, I was able to get the whole rest of the driveway chunked up in less than two hours. Record time.
So that left most of the day - from noon until about 5:30 for Heather and me to pull up the chunks and pile them up for the new patio. It was a full day of hauling chunks up hill, and double wheelbarrow loads from the back yard, taking bites out of the orca pile of dirt and moving them to the front yard. Labor, labor labor. Working in the front yard makes it possible for all the curious neighbors to stop by and make jokes about laboring on Labor Day. Of course, we laughed each time.
At the end of the day today, this is what the future patio looked like. Almost all the way to the same floor level as the living room, and we're pretty much out of big old concrete chunks now; only a few more left that we're using to hold down the cardboard on the "grass." I guess you'd call it yardboard, not cardboard.
And we were able to build up the ground in front of the main entrance too, so the concrete stoop won't require 16 yards of concrete. Just 4 maybe. Here's a 'Before & After" shot, the left one taken on Saturday after I put on the waterproofing and protection board, and the right one taked this morning.
Pete put in a full day today too, more coats of mud on the drywall, making it smoother and smoother. He really is a craftsman - and the corners are all crisp and true. Having done my share of D.I.Y drywall in the past, I have much appreciation for his work. It's looking real good. Tomorrow it's back to work - more labor after all the laboring over the weekend.
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