The Adventures of Buckaroo Drywall Against the World Crime League

On our last episode of Buckaroo Drywall, our heroes had fallen into darkness...

Let's cut right to it cus, full disclosure, this blog is running about a month behind our actual lives and I want to rubber-band snap us all right to the present. *SNAP*

With a bunch of holes in the house from necessary surgery, Brie used Nextdoor to find us a reputable, local contracting service. Brie has become fully obsessed with Nextdoor, a social media app, which though initially designed for people physically living near each other to make contact and communicate, quickly devolved into people with nothing better to do making a general fool of themselves publicly while they air neighborly complaints, post endless drivel like it's there own private journal, and general be the worst that humanity has to offer. Here's a choice description from Wikipedia, "Nextdoor has been criticized for enabling its users to racially profile people of color. As a platform, it also has been accused of operating as fear-based media, serving interests of real estate, private security, and police, reaffirming class and racial biases, and spreading conspiracy theories such as the stolen election conspiracy theory and COVID-19 misinformation.

ANYWHOOOOO, Brie started logging in as a way to get a feel for areas in which we might buy a house and has stayed on it as there are often posts with people getting rid of high quality items for little to no money due to a move or death or something grand like that. She's essentially morphed into the kid that keeps coming home with stray animals and asking me if we can keep them. To date we've gotten a large mirror, a headboard, a table saw, a miter saw, two side tables, and a dining room table, all totaled at less than $250.

Soooooo, Brie noticed this guy named Cesar on the app hustling his ass off to drum up contractor business. He had good reviews and so he came over and met us and saw our situation and we agreed to move forward with two connected projects: 1) The holes in the drywall all over the house and 2) drywalling the ceiling in the bonus room where there was a drop ceiling. WAIT WHAT? Yes, a drop ceiling. 

*flashback sound effects*

At the back of the house there's this odd bonus room off the main. How odd? Well we quickly determined that this used to be a concrete back deck and that some years ago they enclosed it. The entire house has high, impressive peaked ceilings, but in this room they put in a drop ceiling and called it a day, so we needed to drag that down and drywall the walls and the celling all the way to the roof line.

*end flashback sound effects*

So Cesar comes over and gives us a reasonable but not too inexpensive quote on all this work, planning to knock it out that week. He's even going to check on the drywall work that Brie had done herself. WAIT, had I not mentioned that Brie had already framed in a wall and drywalled it?

*flashback sound effects*

I was a theatrical director, coach, and classroom teacher for over a decade. A lot of those jobs, as you guide major projects to an end point, focus on risk mitigation. You never want to be surprised so you have back up plans upon back up plans. You learn to be very good at improvising and pivoting. Frankly, it helps if you come in with those skills. One of my favorite phrases that even goes back to college was, "well worst case scenario..." with the cosmic joke being that one can't really predict worst case, you just do your best. I bring this up b/c Brie over the last few months has unveiled her own new catch phrase/sentence starter and it goes something like this, "I've been preparing my whole life for this." This typically comes in the context of her deciding to start a major interior renovation project with seemingly no preparation, but in reality she spent the entirety of COVID watching home renovation and DIY YouTube videos. Like literally 4-5 hours a day while simultaneously reading related articles on her laptop. It's a real Keanu Reeves situation, but less the Keanu from the Matrix where he instantly learns kung-fu from an upload: 

And more like the Keanu from Johnny Mnemonic where he stores illegal information in his brain via USB upload in a future dystopia. (Worth noting that the movie Johnny Mnemonic has a cybernetically-enhanced talking dolphin named Jones).

One of her first targets when we moved in at the end of January was the bizarre 'pantry' the previous owner had created by cutting a hole in the wall of a bedroom closet and inserting a metal-shelled shelving unit facing the hallway. First week we lived here Brie decided that it could fuck right off and die. And she wasn't wrong. So our first hole was from that. Then she taught herself to frame a wall, then taught herself to install drywall. Cus of course she did.

But wait, Stephen, I hear you say, you own a very well kept 2015 Kia Optima that you just paid off (thank you, everyone) and it would never be able to hold pieces of drywall and all that lumber! This is true! Brie decided that we would just rent a Home Depot van and use that. But what about your dogs, one an old lady and the other a sensitive lad; you'd just moved in and they weren't yet settled to be left alone! Also true! So we had to bring the children along for the ride.

*end flashback sound effects*

Cesar and his team went well beyond what we could've asked. Yes, they drywalled, mudded, and sanded every hole that needed patched, but Cesar walked through the house and anywhere he found a nick or ding he marked it and they filled it. And as to the bonus room, take a look.

They found a weird electrical junction box and just built a custom architectural element around it, which we like.

They even painted everything.

***

Let's jump outside to address the fact that we live in a swamp. We've been using Hernandez Complete Lawn Care (you can see a post about them working on our house from Feb 6th) to deal with the dangerous trees over our house, the 30 years of leaves and debris that was left behind, and now to re-engineer our swale. Here are some pictures of our house in February after some heavy rains. 

(Living the Nightmare)

Jose, owner of the company, suggested we dig out the swale, lay down water permeable mesh piping connecting transition drain tanks, cover it with gravel, layer on a water permeable barrier, cover that with heavy rocks and then fill in with small river rocks. He also suggested laying a French drain along the side of the house which leads to the swale. Here's how it looked in progress and now.

                 

(I had my doubts)

It only took his team 2 days. They worked non-stop to get it knocked out. It looks great (the river rocks are actually much more colorful than this is showing), adds needed structure and definition to the yard, and through multiple storms we aren't seeing anything close to the water build up in the yard like we did before. I don't think we'll ever have a fully dry yard due to the area we live in, but this is such a wonderful start. Brie and I have plans to put in some water gardens to embrace the sections of the yard that will always collect water.

***

Let's head back inside so I can answer the unasked question, "Why did you need to drywall the bonus room ceiling this soon?" It wasn't a risk issue, it wasn't affecting daily life, but it was a needed step before starting the next big interior project.

Back in March we pulled the trigger on purchasing enough cork flooring for the entire house. It was a lot of flooring. I'll set aside a future post to list out all the expenses we've had b/c not enough renovation blogs are honest about the cost of doing this work.

In early April a truck arrived with 1400 sq ft of cork flooring and all the necessary items for us to install everything ourselves. This was yet another, "I've been preparing my whole life for this" moment.

We're currently storing the everything in the murder room.

Yadda, yadda, you just don't want to do drywall and painting AFTER you put in new flooring, it's a great way to ruin the floors. So Cesar does his thing and leaves which means it's time for us to take up the shitty blue carpet laid over MDF and cardboard and we finally get it down to the wooden sub floor. NOTE: There is no asbestos tile in the bonus room since it was modern construction, but the rest of the house has asbestos tile since it's a 60s build. Asbestos is incredibly dangerous to remove as the cracking and tearing is what causes it to aerosolize. Many experts told us to simply leave it in place and float a floor over it and we would never have to worry about it. Just wanted to assure everyone.

So we took up the MDF but discovered water damage in the corner where the new and old construction met. So Brie declared, "I've been preparing my whole life for this." 

Brie sawed out the corner drywall discovering a rotted load-bearing beam. She cleaned out the mold, used a bonding epoxy to encase and strengthen the structural corner, filled everything with spray foam to insulate the corner and prevent further water seepage, then re-drywalled the corner, mudded and sanded it, and now it's waiting to be repainted. She then taped and caulked the entire room to make it water tight so we can pour levelling cement to create a level floor that matches the adjoining bedroom. I think we're doing that this weekend.

 

***

We were having our friends Caitlin and Laura over this past weekend and with that on the calendar for a couple of weeks, it was decided to use that as a carrot to complete Brie's office. Up until now it had been our tool room with excess moving boxes filling the corners. The holes in the walls (thanks to Barry and Brie) made it a less than ideal work space. Also it was the only room without carpeting laid over the asbestos flooring so it made for a less than pleasant walking experience.

Brie and I repainted the ceiling with fresh white paint (very tall ceilings make for exhausting work it turns out), hit the walls with a woody gray that Brie had selected and then she removed the base boards and floor heating vent (the whole house has baseboard heating vents). Oh, and she wallpapered an accent wall.

Then when I was out leading my trivia team to victory last Thursday (thank you, everyone) she texted me that she had started to floor the room. We installed flooring all day Friday and come the weekend we had a completed but not finished room for Brie to use as her day office and also guest room as necessary.

***

And that more or less catches us up. 

• The yard is clear, dry, and structured. 
• All rooms have finished ceilings and safe electrical.
• A previously unusable room is painted, papered, floored, and furnished.
• The bonus room is one step away from getting floored.
• Future projects (as in this coming month) includes flooring the bonus room, then moving the bedroom into there while we repaint the bedroom and then floor it. 

I haven't made another video mostly because, well, did you just read all of this? We've only lived in the house 3 months! 

My plan is to do a video for my next post, because I really want to tell the story about how I bought a $140 wheel barrow by accident.

What have we done?

-Stephen