Sheetrocking, The Saga Continues

The demo work at the farmhouse is complete. New thermal pane windows have been installed. A new closet has been framed out. (Please let my calculations for the rough opening be correct.) All critter holes in the exterior siding have been plugged, screened, caulked, and tarpapered over. Exterior walls have been insulated. Wiring has been run for the closet light. All sheetrock has been hung and the first round of tape and mud has been applied. That's seven days of work since finding the snake if anybody is keeping track.

Hubby and I have decided we are too old and out of shape to do construction work for more than two days at a time. We work two days and rest two days. Of course each day of work involves a three hour round trip driving over the back roads of rural Arkansas in a work truck. The trip alone beats us up pretty good and Hubby is already tired when he arrives to start work.

Friday we started the taping and mudding phase. Mudding sheetrock is probably the worst task on a rehab job. We learned how to mud sheetrock by trial and error so there is probably an easier way to do things. We've also probably forgotten a few tricks we learned along the way because too many years pass between sheetrocking projects. Of course each time a room is completed I vow I'll never sheetrock again, but somehow I keep getting dragged back into these farmhouse projects. The good thing about our inexperience is that no matter what we do, no matter how many mistakes we make, it always looks 100 times better than it did. Our motto: "It ain't perfect, but it's better than it wuz."

Saturday we sanded down the first mud. I forgot that sanding sheetrock is actually a worse job than mudding. We wear masks but I know half a pound of gypsum dust is probably sitting in my lungs right now; they are on fire. I always wonder if I'll end up with sheetrock dust pneumonia. My neighbor ended up in the hospital for seven days with it when they remodeled their living room.

Hubby put a box fan in the window to help exhaust some of the dust. He set it up on the sill, looked down at it, took it back out of the window and starting taking the grill off.

Let me pause for a moment in the story and tell you about my husband's obsession with box fans. We have two in our house that run 24/7. He loves the noise and the blow. I hate the noise and the blow. He is obsessive about keeping them clean. He periodically takes them completely apart and cleans them with a toothbrush and toothpick. Nary smidge of dust nor cat hair is tolerable on the precious box fans. In truth they would probably last a lot longer if he would clean them a little less fastidiously and a lot less often.

So he starts taking the grill off the box fan at the farm. I'm thinking, "Hellz bellz boy, don't clean the fan now, clean it after we get through sanding. A cat hair isn't gonna hurt a damned thing with this mess!" I go over to rip him a new one and I see what he sees. There is a dead mouse in the fan. Fairly large, healthy looking mouse except he's dead and all. Now how in tarnation did a mouse get inside a box fan? He was too big to fit through any space in the grill, and the housing of the fan was metal. It's a mystery, but there he was. Somehow he got in and couldn't get out and died in there. Ugh.

You will note I mentioned cat hair. Yes, there are four cats at the farm. Indoor cats. Worthless beasts apparently. I vote to turn them out and let them become hawk or coyote food. Might as well be good for something. Obviously they are not mousers.

So add one more dead critter to the list. (The mouse, not the cats.)

Having all these wild critters in the house without me knowing they were there would give me a big ol' case of the heebie jeebies. But that's life on a farm. Hubby's momma wouldn't trade it for nuthin'.

I'm glad I'm a city girl.