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Where to begin with this update? First, I should mention the drywall disaster. I’ll be brief, because I think it deserves its own post!

Instead of doing the drywall ourselves, we hired a contractor to make the process go faster and with skill. We thought the money was worth the time and mistakes we’d save. Unfortunately, the exact opposite occurred. It ended up being money out of our budget, four times as long as planned, full of mistakes, and it never actually got finished. The worst part of it all was that he lied to us. He asked for a draw to pay his laborers (which was not part of our agreed upon contract), but never paid them. Weeks later, they still haven’t been paid. He’s literally hiding from them: parking his truck down the street from his house, not answering his phone, etc. After giving him more than enough chances, we paid him for the work and product received and went looking for someone else to finish the job (he pocketed that money and still hasn’t paid his workers, by the way).

We’re back on track now, though. We hired a crew (Tim Goad) that was highly recommended and they’ve done a fantastic job of fixing the previous contractor’s mistakes. I wish I’d kept count of all the outlets and light fixtures that were covered by drywall.

Since the original drywaller didn’t put down any building paper or plastic, we had quite a bit of cleaning up to do. The floor underlayment would be unlevel and won’t adhere to the subfloor if it’s covered in chunks of drywall mud. So we went at it with loud music, a scraper and a vacuum.

Scott and Randy (one of the guys the drywaller never paid) worked together to lay the floor underlayment. We used EcoBond zero VOC adhesive (and screws).

After seeing the space so bright with only white primer on it, we began to reconsider our color choice. The saturated blue/gray was gorgeous, but the openness of a light color felt right. We ended up choosing a Parker Paint low VOC gray color called Womb. It’s not cold or icy. Today Tim and Adam finished painting. It was so exciting to see paint on the walls. Unfortunately, today we also discovered that we missed two can light fixtures covered over by drywall, so we’ll have to cut those out tomorrow. I guess we should be happy we found them now! I wonder what else we missed…

This week we also installed our passive air vents. Because our doors and windows don’t have vents in them, we had to install three of the air vents in our house to bring fresh air in.

Next on our agenda is to finish the underlayment, re-connect all electrical stuff, construct our cabinets and lay flooring. And somewhere in there we’ll be figuring out exactly what we’re going to say at Gnomedex.