Covering Up our Beautiful Framing

Welcome back to our home renovation and remodel project. 

Today, we are getting started on something pretty exciting! We’ve got sheet rock to hang up on the walls, which will start transforming the space into something a little less like a construction zone. So we have sheets of 5/8 to go up on the ceiling, and we have sheets of 1/2 inch to go up on the walls. About two thirds of this is going into the sunroom and kitchen area, and the remaining third is going to go down in the basement into the office space. Now, in the sunroom, most of the interior is going to be trim, so a lot of this is not going to be the final surface that you’re going to see. It’ll just be on the wall padding it all out and getting it all nice and lined up. 

We’re going to get these sheets into the house and get them hung up. My friend, Eric, is stopping by for a few hours today to give us a hand, and Donavan has Lori here helping us today as well, so it should go pretty quickly. 

First row is up. Now we’re going to start on the second row at the far end with a full piece and work back this way. It’s already starting to look different!

– Check it out: the whole kitchen, breakfast nook and pantry have complete ceiling sheets. The sunroom is just missing two pieces, because we are waiting on the parapet cap to make sure it’s fully sealed before we put those sheets up.

Now we’re shifting to the 1/2 inch, and we’re going to work on the wall. There’s just a few obstacles on a few of these walls. We have the electrical for the under-the-cabinet power and lights. The hood is a little higher on the wall, and of course there’s the plumbing and electrical under the sink. 

Now we can start getting some of the sheets installed on the walls. 

We are doing some piecemealing for the walls in the sunroom. 

It’s starting to look like a room. 

As we were framing this, a lot of people were asking what this was going to be. We were playing with the concept of having a window in the pantry. The idea is, if you’re in this pantry, it just feels like it’s a box and it doesn’t feel that open. So by having a window here, it allows some light into the pantry. We’re going back and forth on this, I have been given the final say on if we’re going to do it or not. I’m thinking yes, so we’re going to cut it out and see how it feels. 

This is the right move, I like this a lot. There’s a few different concepts we can do here, of course. We can leave it open, we could have an actual piece of glass there, we could have a frosted glass, or we could have a one-way mirror. Because the downside to this is that people can see into your pantry.

So that is pretty much it for the sheet rock up here. It’s really looking like some nicely defined spaces now. You can clearly see the breakfast nook area, the pantry, the kitchen, and the sunroom, and it’s all looking really nice and bright. 

Next we’re going to go downstairs and do the office. We’re going to start on this corner with the ceiling again. We have our bubble wrap insulation that directs our in-floor radiant heat up into the sunroom above. 

We can install directly into our ICF because it has some thick plastic running through it. 

We got a lot of questions about running electrical through the ICF foundation. So you can see how the electricians put this in here. They just had to make a cut and shove the wire in there. And they just cut the box out and attached it to the concrete behind it. It’s actually pretty seamless and simple. 

Here is the basement space with the drywall completely hung up. It looks a lot different than it did just a couple of days ago, and it feels like a real room now. 

The last thing on the drywall agenda is to patch these holes in the great room. We have the hole where we inserted the beam that carries the front addition and the hole which used to be the entryway into the great room. We also have the old window opening to patch up, as well as some patching around the two windows which were enlarged. 

So next time we’re going to be doing some taping and mudding! Thank you as always for joining us, we greatly appreciate it. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave us a comment. As always, we’d be happy to answer any questions you might have. And until next time, happy woodworking.