Up until now, almost all of our updates on the house have been about the exterior. And in fact, as I write this, Jes is writing a post on the continued evolution of the exterior. Having said that, today I want to talk about the interior for the first time. We went over to the house yesterday to check on the progress and were blown away to find out that we could no longer see through all of the walls. All of the major pieces of drywall have been put in place, and for the first time ever, the inside actually looks like a house with rooms. It wasn’t always that way though, so let’s take a quick tour through all of the steps that you have missed out on.
The first thing that had to happen was obviously to frame out the walls. That part is easy enough, other than having to move a window three different times, everything else went smoothly. After the walls are all in the right spot, the plumbing infrastructure goes in. This involves all of the pipes that go inside the walls, and also included installing the bathtubs in the two upstairs bathrooms. HVAC followed plumbing, and then electrical followed that. Keep in mind that during all of this time (each took a little less than a week), you can see through all of the interior walls, which means it is hard to get a true feel for how it will look and feel when it is does. Electrical involved a walk through to place all of our outlets and switches, which was a little difficult in the main kitchen/living/dining area because we don’t have any walls. We thought pretty long and hard about where all of the switches should go, so if a year from now we don’t understand why a particular switch is somewhere we only have ourselves to blame. After electrical came low voltage (phone, internet, cable, speakers, and security system) which involved another walk through, and then insulation. We chose to put in spray foam insulation because it is supposed to be superior to batt insulation.
Which brought us to Thursday when the drywall was dropped off. Our builder told us that drywall would take 1.5 to 2 weeks to complete, but didn’t tell us what the progress inside those two weeks would look like. Yesterday evening we went to check on the house and were blown away that all of the drywall for the walls and ceilings had been put up and taped. Well, everything except the living and dining room, which will get shiplap instead of drywall.
For the first time ever we could walk through the house and get a true feeling of how each room would be and I was blown away. There was always that shred of doubt of “did we do the right thing” throughout this entire process, but that shred left me as we walked through each room. Almost every room that I thought would be “too small” when I could see through the walls all of sudden looked much bigger. The view from our master bedroom now looks “right” and is exactly what I wanted. Everything really came together with the drywall and I could not be happier. I’m not sure the pictures will do it justice, so hopefully the words will. From here on out it is all about finishes, so it will just continue to get closer and closer to our dream house.
