The Local Drunks are Nice

The day before today, I went out to begin smoothing the 32 thousand pounds of gravel in my backyard that I had mentioned in my post yesterday. My new neighbors, renting the old Post Office next door that has since been turned into an ugly house (a solid red brick rectangle thing with a flat roof) noticed me and said that he was going to help. I simply smiled and said okay. He said that he would help a few days earlier, when they were having a party in their backyard. But at that point, they were so drunk; I have a hard time believing he could remember the encounter. Anyway, he then said that he would do the rest of the gravel in two hours for $20. I thought about it for a moment, and then agreed to his terms. When I got back a few hours later, it wasn’t finished, but they had gotten more done than I honestly expected, and so I gave them the $20. They said they would finish the job today, but either way, I think they earned their money. This was a big help to me, because I was not looking forward to moving it all by myself.

Back to the inside of my house… After we got the beam up, and most of the electrical settled, we moved on to the trim around the windows and door, and the crown molding around the ceiling. I wanted noticeable trim, and I painted it all a dark gray, the same color my accent wall is currently. I also got some of the thickest trim possible so that it would definitely stand out.

The crown molding was my own brain child. I wasn’t sure how well it was going to turn out because I had never seen anyone do anything like it before, but I am very pleased with the results. I ended up putting regular 2X6’s all the way across the ceiling, and then one all the way across the wall. Then I put a half inch round above, below and in the middle of the 2X6’s. There will be a picture to illustrate. One of the challenges was that the west wall did not have any studs available in the ceiling to attach the 2X6 to, and so we had to go up in the loft and give it some support.

We also put in the flooring. I wanted a nice rich dark color. I debated greatly on whether or not to simply refinish the old hard wood floors already available. But after examining the cost and longevity compared to look, I chose a laminate I found for a killer deal in the Classifieds on KSL. I think that the flooring looks great. The initial challenge with the flooring was with the fact that the starting wall was not perfectly even and straight, and so we could not find a flat edge to start the snap in laminate on. We ended up removing the trim along the starting wall, stapling the laminate down so that we could have an even start, then it was relatively easy from their to continue to snap the rest of it in.


That is just the physical aspect of the labor. The trick to this labor was also helping Ernest focus with four kids running around. I often found myself babysitting while he worked on the technical side of things. Once the kids got out of hand, Ernest would quickly lose focus, and everything would slow way down. One other thing to consider when doing a project like this is your helps schedule.

More Later…