We've been busy.

We’ve made so much construction debris from the 2 rooms and 1 hallway we’ve demolished that we were up to our ears in garbage.

OK, not really. But the pile was waist-high and took over one half of our 2-car garage.

Most of those bags are filled with plaster crumbles and lathe strips, and even my poor camera lens didn’t make it through our demo days without getting covered in little bits of plaster dust.

For the past 2 months, one side of our garage has been the landfill, and the other side has been our supply storage:

From L to R: bad graffiti, studs, planks, sheetrock, foam insulation, new windows, more sheetrock, more bad graffiti.

Apparently some neighborhood kids broke into the garage before we got the house and left some pretty terrible graffiti on the walls:

“Reject of Society” still cracks us up every time we see it. Can 13 year olds be any more dramatic?

Check out our new low-e windows for the Smurf room:

We kept looking at them longingly, wishing we were installing windows instead of doing grunt work. See, our garage was so full with garbage that we decided to rent a dumpster.

And we spent half of Sunday hauling bags and planks and rolls of disgusting old carpet from the garage to the dumpster.

We filled up the entire thing within the matter of hours. And we saw something we haven’t seen in a very long time:

The floor of our garage! Look closely and you can see our dishwasher. We miss that sucker like nobody’s business. Someday it’ll live in our kitchen, but for now, it’s in renovation limbo.

We found something else on the newly rediscovered garage floor that totally freaked us out:

At first glance, we thought it was mouse poo, but then we found the culprit sleeping in the rafters of our garage attic: a teeny, tiny bat! We were totally grossed out by the poo all over our stuff, but at the same time, we thought the bat was….kinda cute. Plus she’s keeping bugs out of our garage, so she’s earning her keep. But in the end, the poo is too gross to deal with. We’re going to wait until she leaves one night and then seal up all of the cracks in the garage’s attic. Sorry, little bat!

After we finished garbage duty, we split up and worked on two different projects. Bradley mudded the hallway and Smurf room, and I emptied out our guest bedroom.

Spoiler alert! We’re putting up closet doors in our guest bedroom! More on that later. We’re getting sooooo close to finishing up the guest bedroom. It’s almost painting time! Exciting!

I also removed all of the trim around the guest bedroom windows:

We weren’t huge fans of the wood trim in all of the rooms, so we’re going with something more modern and clean: trimless windows. They’re going to be sheetrocked all around, and we’ll make concrete sills for the bottom. That’s coming up soon!

After removing the trim, we were pretty excited to see that someone had already used foam insulation to seal up the cracks:

One less thing we have to do!

Anyway, we’d been using the guest bedroom as our work station. All the tools were stored here, as well as our saw horses and other supplies we might need. I relocated everything to the master bedroom, and I got my Type A on by totally reorganizing everything.

I set up the saw horses in the middle of the room. We’re using an old door that we removed as our table top:

The master bedroom is way bigger than the guest bedroom, so we have a little more room to spread out. The guest bedroom was getting a little cramped for the amount of stuff we had in there.

The plastic box on the left has a bunch of hardware. The brown cardboard box in the back has all of our painting and staining supplies. The Corona box in front holds all of our electrical stuff like wires and outlet boxes and lightswitch plates.

Next to the boxes, I set up an insulation corner: vapor barrier, fiberglass batting, metallic tape, foam insulation, and a little tub of spackle. The little pieces of wood next to the insulation are shims for our doors and windows.

There’s a bunch of leftover sheetrock leaning against the wall, and then a little metal rack that I nabbed from the garage:

The bottom of the rack holds powertools. The top rack is has a toolbox that holds just screws and nails (the box that says Husky). Extra nails and screws in cardboard boxes are next to the toolbox.

On top of the radiator is a little organizer thingy with a bunch of drawers. That holds hooks, boxcutter blades small hardware and a bunch of random things we may need (length of chain, anyone?). There’s also a tool bag that holds hand tools.

Scrap wood leans up against one corner. I tossed all of our salvageable wood on the floor against the wall. This is the stuff that escaped the garbage pile. Smaller scraps of salvageable wood lean against the corner:

We put all of our extra foam insulation in the closet. We read that the foam degrades when exposed to sunlight for a long time, so we put it in our dark closet. Better safe than sorry!

And, finally, in the last corner, we have our air compressor:

Hey, how’d that hole get there?

We got a super long hose for the air compressor so instead of schlepping it room to room, we can leave it in the master bedroom and run the hose to the room we need. So much easier that way. And easier on the ears too — air compressors are loud.

Speaking of air compressors…

I think Bradley’s in love. He finally got to use his air compressor when he framed the guest bedroom closet:

It took him all of 30 seconds to get all of the nails in. And it drives the nail down deep enough so he doesn’t have to set the nails. We love it!

What we learned over the weekend:

• Getting organized saves a ton of time in the long run. At least we really hope it will, because we wasted half a day doing it.
• One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Our neighbor came over and asked if he could snag some trim from our dumpster. Hooray for keeping stuff out of a landfill!
• Elmer’s makes more than just the glue we ate in elementary school:

• Also, wood filler looks a lot like peanut butter mousse. Nom nom nom!

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