First Floor Renovation on Track!

Green is such a lovely color!  Polly and I finished the drywall in the bathroom and kitchen yesterday, and have begun to tape and "mud." 

However, in order to get to the point of drywall, there was a LOT of shimming and adding furring strips behind the walls to true, straighten, and plumb them.  In fact, we spent nearly a weekend on that task alone.  Additionally, there was also a lack of structure in the "wet wall," which needed to be addressed in order to hang the drywall securely.  In the center of the pipes, we added a  "4-layer sandwich" stack of 2"X3" about 3' long, screwed and glued to the backside of the kitchen drywall side to serve as a nailer for the bathroom side drywall. 

OK, so this particular task was NOT FUN.  We decided to add a exhaust fan to the bathroom--why not?  The walls were open, it would be as simple as cutting a hole in the wall and sticking a vent pipe through...

Except, as you can see, the hole was 20' off the ground, and the brick was WAY more difficult to cut through than I imagined.  Plus, I did not have the proper size hole-saw, so I wound up connecting the dots with a 1" masonry drill bit.  Here Polly is finishing the caulking around the plastic vent louver. 

Finished job, wired up and functioning--an Air King High Performance 90 CFM Ceiling Exhaust Bath Fan.  Two swivel elbows and a 4" flex line complete the venting.

The tailpiece through the wall needed to be cemented, and that brick removed (on the right) just did not want to fit back into the puzzle exactly...but it is in there!  Note the Roxul insulation in the exterior wall.  We also added it in between the ceiling joists for sound damping and as a fire stop.