Garbage time

Holy crap that’s a lot of garbage. And good riddance, I'm happy to see it go!

This sight made me so happy

The hardest part of this entire project has been working in small increments of time, then having to go do everyday life stuff while more progress on whatever steps were next stayed juuuuust out of reach. I spent a lot of time at work googling how to do things and finding finishing options just b/c that was all I could if I wasn’t in the actual basement. I watched a mudding video dozens of times.

But summer hours have kicked in and I’ve had a long weekend with some dedicated project time. Which means now we’ve made some real progress, and it’s time to start getting rid of some of these old materials. I’m more than ready to toss these old boards and move on. Hello, dumpster bag.

And hopefully goodbye, very soon.

Of course, you have to figure out a good way to load the garbage, which took me multiple attempts b/c I'm an idiot. But eventually I got nearly everything in: 25 drywall sections' worth of horrible wood paneling, trim, molding, and most of the insulation. Yikes. And I only had to trim some of it; when it was coming down I would try to see how big a piece I could pry off, and some of them ended up too big for the bag. Oops. Now hopefully it gets picked up soon. I was given a range of days, nothing exact, so we'll see how it goes. 

Yeah, this was not going to work.

I can’t believe some of the contractors we got estimates from suggested re-using the trim to help save on costs. And they were still pushing $5K on their estimate. The only salvageable parts of these walls was the little quarter round of trim at the bottom that costs a whole $1.50 for 8 feet. A savings of about $25. Yeah, I’m okay tossing those too.

Good lord, I just realized that those estimates didn’t include any of the materials or labor for dealing with the insulation, it was all just the walls. Maybe they had some of that factored in, maybe final costs would have been even higher. Okay, for all the headaches doing this myself still seems like the way to go.

Unforeseen expenses are lurking around every corner. You know what makes the hardest part of a project like this even harder? When your $%*&ing air conditioner breaks down and you have to try to get your home warranty company to agree to the services their contractor says you need. So fuck Home Warranty of America, and at least spending $1500 this weekend to get the AC back on wasn’t on top of paying $5K+ to get this drywall job done. For fuck’s sake.