Some Things

More progress last night. And probably more tonight, too. Woo-hoo!

This is my handy drill with a forstner bit in it. The Forstner is the only way we found to get a 3/4" hole in a short enough bit to be able to work in the appropriate gap. It's a nice bit, for sure. This won't be the last time we need it.

Hole: Drilled.

This is the toggle bolt thingy we're using. It folds in, pushes through the hole, then springs out on the other side to hold against the drywall. It's a great way to hold something to drywall when you really really don't want it going anywhere.

You've got the mechanical advantage of the screw going for you, so you could really crank this thing down. You don't need to, though. Just get it nice and snug. We ended up doing this on all the surfaces that couldn't be nailed into something solid.

New showerhead. It's actually kinda chintzy. The handle piece doesn't stay in the outer ring very well at all. It looks super handy, and it would be if it worked, but I think it's going to have to come out. Just not very nice at all. Way to fail, Delta.

That's about it. Tonight, we continue to work on the filing (Jenna and my mom) and organizing the basement (me and my dad). Not sexy projects like building walls, perhaps, but still very important. Especially the filing. We're freakin' adults now. We need files.

Real Actual Progress

So instead of just garden shots, this time you get actual real work on the house. Woohoo!

You know the room where we busted out the closet to make extra room for the master bath? Well in order for it to continue being a bedroom, it needs a new closet. So we got on that. But first, we emptied it of a bunch of junk that had accumulated there, swept up, then painted the floor with two coats of oil-based primer. Oil based primer smells like the devil doing a laundry load composed entirely of devil socks and tortured souls. Super gross. We left the window open overnight to let it air out, and stayed out of the house as much as possible. It had the desired effect, though:

That's the first coat, obviously.

This is the second coat.

Now we get to work building the actual for real closet that will be in here eventually. We're building this one the way that all the books say to do it instead of building it the "belt and suspenders and maybe also some kind of pulley system" that we Reeces are so famous for. It's going to be much faster and cleaner and will still be about 150% the quality of the original construction of our house.

Just a test fitting of the new end wall to see how it's going to fit in there. Looks good to me.

Here it is all nailed together. I missed working with that nail gun. It makes stuff so fast.

My dad, checking the wall to see if it's plumb. Here's where we started getting frustrated with the original builders. You'll notice it's early in the process.

Here's the other piece of the closet. This will go over the door.

My dad is getting this whole thing set up properly. Again, we are frustrated.

Now we're locking it in place. We had to sort of split the difference between installing it correctly (level, plumb and square) and installing it so it actually fit the existing walls (wonky, lame and haphazard).

That's about as far as we got, though. We'll be using some toggle bolts to tie the frame to the existing drywall in places where we don't have studs, but that will pretty much do it until drywall.

Thanks for reading!