Monday, August 10, 2015

Sheet goods and narrow stairways

Most of the upstairs demo is done. We tore out a bit more sheetrock from the closet and ripped up the remaining carpet. So we’re now carpet free. The trailer was loaded for another dump run. We removed about two full trailer loads of debris from the upstairs. We then loaded up the trailer with sheet goods, 21 sheets of OBS for the floors, 15 sheets of sheetrock and two sheets of cement board for the bathroom floors. Then we found out that the stairway is too narrow to carry a 4×8 sheet of anything up there. There’s just no way to make the corner. If we had a crane we could probably get them in through the window or balcony door, but we don’t. Time to get creative. We cut the OBS sheets in half, it’s just for additional subfloor so it won’t matter much. We were then able to lift each 4×4 sheet up to the second floor balcony, bypassing the stairs and getting in a good upper body workout. For the sheetrock, we’re just going to cut it to size outside (so we have smaller pieces) and haul it up as we need it. We’ll end up with more seams to tape and mud, but there’s probably not more than 2 or 3 places where we could actually use a full sheet anyway.

We replaced more of the old outlet/switch boxes with new boxes, new outlets, new wire. Also ran some of the wire for the bathroom electrical. This was held up a bit by the fact that I ordered the wrong type of box for junction boxes from Lowes. We also found a couple of wires with staples embedded in the wire (Yikes!). These were the staples that were used to hold in the insulation. Since we’re using Roxel rock wool, we don’t need no stinking staples to hold it in place.