Sheetrock has entered the building!!! Hallelujah! Joe has taken on hanging the sheetrock in the house and he’s also good at it! He started hanging bead board on the ceiling and then picked up twenty sheets of drywall and started in this past weekend totally without my help. The majority of the master bedroom is now rocked and ready for tape, he’s picking up more bead board tonight so he can finish the ceilings and the slanted walls this week.

Meanwhile I’ve been living in the dungeon and doing what I’m calling, “Tying up loose ends” Most specifically, finishing up all of the plumbing connections. Drains and vents have been done for a very long time and the majority of the pex water lines have been run but I hadn’t yet hooked them all up. Well, now I’m hooking them all up. I purchased two Copper Manifolds (affiliate Link) that I hooked all of my main pex lines to this last weekend. Note to anyone using pex: They don’t make manifolds for anything above 1/2. This was a problem because I ran all of my main lines with 3/4 so I ended up having to reduce to 1/2 then expand back to 3/4 and basically destroy any water pressure/reason to use 3/4 pipe in the first place. This is where experience would have saved me and a better man(woman) then me probably would have pulled all of the 3/4 out of the house, replaced it with 1/2 just because it would have been the “right” way to do things. Or I could have scrapped the manifold entirely and just hooked em all up together in a mess of pex pipe… I really wanted to use the manifolds – don’t ask me why necessarily, it did cost more of course considering I didn’t HAVE to use them but to my brain they just made sense. I had also planned to use manifolds when I ran the water lines and God help you if you try to stop me from fullfilling one of my plans. So I hooked em up in all of their not-perfect glory and said, “Done.” I also have ALL of the electrical done except the big run for the hot water heater that I just keep putting off because I have to crawl into the crawl space again/one last time.

I’ll save you from having to see more pics of the dreary dungeon until next time. It hasn’t changed much, it’s still dark and depressing but, at least, now its above freezing because I got the basement heaters installed a couple of weeks ago. Also a note about pex: 3/4 sharkbite pex clamps are hard as hell to clamp shut. No, I don’t just mean difficult I mean it literally takes all I have and several breaks in between to get one clamp on. Like, really? Seriously!? It really shouldn’t be so difficult but it is. Several times I broke down in hysterical laughter because it’s just so silly! I strained my elbow and pulled a whole bunch of muscles in my left boob (what is it with me and hurting my poor left boob area?). Looking back the entire house would have been run with 1/2 inch pex using SharkBite Fittings (affiliate link) (not those damned clamps, yeah they’re more expensive but my left elbow and boob area is important to me) and life would have been easier and the manifolds would have been perfect. Oh well, life isn’t perfect. Whenever I need a break I haul my butt up two flights of stairs to where Joe is working in the bright and warm master bedroom. I don’t know about you, but every time I go up there or look at the pictures of the master bedroom my heart just sings. It’s gonna be great. I can’t wait.