Mudding and taping began the day after Christmas, and with smearing mud on the walls that meant turning the heat in the house WAY up. Basically we wanted the mud to dry, and considering the super cold temperatures outside, we did NOT want the mud to freeze instead. So we needed to keep up a constant heat blowing through the basement. To help keep us from roasting upstairs, and to help keep most of the warm air blowing through downstairs we closed every vent on the main floor, and we blocked the one under the kitchen sink with a towel (it doesn’t have a way to close it like the others).
Kyle had a couple of guys from our phone company come out and fix the internet wiring December 27th. Since they needed to cut a couple of holes in the brand new drywall to get the cables to where Kyle wanted them, I did feel a bit annoyed that this wasn’t done before the drywall went up. Weston was very nice about it though and did get the drywall fixed back up and smeared mud on it to smooth it out, but he wasn’t able to do very much else that day because the mud from the day before still wasn’t fully dry. So Weston and his work buddy were back out the next day to do some more mudding.
Weston went to Mexico over the weekend to be with his family for New Years. He flew back into Utah on Wednesday (Jan 2) and he came straight out here, right from the airport to get some more work done. He was here until about 1 am. I have to admire his desire to get the job done, but we totally would have understood if he didn’t come out until the next morning. He was back the next morning too, and worked until mid afternoon, then he decided to go home and get some rest since he couldn’t really do anything else until the mud had dried and he was wiped out from being here so late the night before.
Before they could begin texturing they had to sand down all of the mud to make sure everything was nice and smooth. This part is a nasty business, because it makes a mess everywhere and it can’t be healthy to breath that stuff. Even though we kept the basement door shut unless one of the guys was walking through it, there was a layer of dust everywhere on the main floor. It was most easily noticed on the dining table because we like to wipe it off after meals, so when the table was no longer shiny but had this hazy appearance I would go over and swipe my finger on it and that would give away just how much dust was on the table, again. It took forever for them to be ready to spray the walls with the texture, but once they were ready it didn’t take them very long to spray the walls.
Of course having the texture on the walls meant the heat had to go back up again to help it dry, as to make the stuff to spray on the walls took many gallons of water. And after the walls dried they had to finish up with texturing the ceiling. This took longer than the walls did, because this they had to do by hand.
After they finished with the ceiling and it had a chance to dry they had to sand that down so there wouldn’t be any pointy drips hanging down, but now they are completely done and we are pretty much ready for paint!
