Finishing Behind the Walls and Ceiling

There's a lot of stuff inside walls. Now that I've seen how many pipes and wires are in there, it seems like a miracle that I've never hit anything when I've hung stuff up in my house, since I basically drill/hammer at random. All of the things behind the walls had to be inspected before the walls could be closed, which began on Friday. You can now really see the individual rooms. For example, here are the bathrooms (currently storing some ducting):



The drywall guys are finishing this weekend so that we can have the all-important Screw Inspection on Monday. Unfortunately that inspection is not designed to tell us who has some screws loose, rather it serves the much less useful function of allowing the City of Denver to certify that we have enough screws in the walls. I would say that if the wall is staying up, it has enough screws, but what do I know. What, exactly, is the danger of having too few screws, anyway? I mean, obviously if your electrical system is incorrectly wired you could be in imminent danger, but if you don't have enough screws in the walls, what terrible fate could befall you? One day your wall is abruptly going to fall off and kill you?

Lots of stuff is going on above the ceiling as well. Jill christened Thursday as Ladder Day, because there were guys everywhere on ladders and stilts (!), hanging framing for the ceiling and putting up our lights. I'm sad that I didn't get a picture of the guys on stilts, but here's one view of Ladder Day:


Jill and I spent about six ineffectual hours trying to explain how we wanted the lights to be installed, which was made difficult by the twin facts that we have no idea what we're talking about, and the electrician is tuned to a different frequency altogether. So we talked at each other at lot, made several calls the harass the guy who sold the lights to us in an attempt to understand how far apart these lights are supposed to be placed (don't you feel like that should be on the package or something?), and then the electrician did something different from what we wanted, but I'm sure it will be fine.

After much worry over the condition of the brick in our interior wall and the cost to have it sanded and sealed, we have finally committed to having it done. The guys came to start grinding the brick, and I took a picture as they were getting started. Then I had to leave because this process generated so much dust that it there was a red cloud coming out the door, even though they had a vacuum hooked up to their grinders to suck off some of the dust. Amusingly, the guys hadn't shown up with dust masks or eye protection, so Aaron gave them dust masks and one of them had to wear my $4 goggles from Home Depot, which certainly make a fashion statement.



At the end of the day on Friday, Aaron and I were discussing whether to replace some of the windows at the front of the building, and we were wondering what was between these two windows (clearly something had been covered up here--you can see the difference on the outside of the building). In typical problem-solving fashion, Aaron grabbed a broomstick that was nearby and made a hole in the wall:


He peeled off several layers of stuff (plaster, drywall, foamcore) and found that there's another window behind there! So now we have three windows! This building is so weird. Why would you cover up a window on the front of your store?