Walls! Lights!

It's the simple things that make us happy.

Having sufficiently recovered from helping to cause cavities in over 330 children last night, we set about the task of drywalling the entryway.  If you have never attempted drywalling, all the stories are true: it is a huge pain and you should hire someone who knows what they're doing and owns all the proper expensive tools. People claim it's the mudding and taping and sanding that gets to them, but for me it's lifting the giant sheets above my head while simultaneously trying to screw it in place. Ugh.

But, like all projects, as long as you keep doing something, eventually it will get done. Here's Gabe tackling another fun aspect of old-house renovations - making flimsy new studs match the width of the much burlier old studs.  You can achieve this by ripping lath in half the hard way.  By doing this, your walls have a prayer of not being too lumpy.

Much grunting and groaning later (here's some marriage advice from those of us who just celebrated our 2 monthaversary: never yell at your spouse when you're really mad at something else, such as discovering while holding a 75-lb piece of drywall over your head that you never leveled your light fixture box), this is what we've got.  What a relief to finally have walls over the exposed insulation we've had next to that door for nearly a year!

Speaking of light fixtures, Gabe and I recently became electricians.  It's amazing what you can learn from a $6 home wiring book purchased from the book guy at the Fryeburg Fair.  All knob-and-tube wiring has now been purged from the entry.  The room now features two new outlets into which you can plug things with three prongs, and some super-sexy reproduction push-button light switches.  I had to order them from Amazon and they were a splurge but they were worth it. These modern beauties have their own set of neat features, such as inlaid faux mother-of-pearl buttons and the fact that they are grounded and thus less likely to burn our house down.  Did you know that the old-school push-button light switches actually threw a spark inside the switch?  I just learned this after nearly two years of using the one in this room, which only turned the light on an average of one out of three times you pushed it. We have lots of these switches throughout the house, and the repros will allow us to reuse the even sexier antique brass switch plates.  

We also installed some exterior lights so we can grill 24/7 on our totally sweet new deck.  Grilling in the winter is fun, and will be especially great if we decide we can't take our kitchen anymore and impulsively rip it out in January. Mostly it's just great to actually have light switches next to the door.  Like I said, it's the simple things.