To continue...the we
ek before Christmas, the drywallers came. The boards went up pretty fast, and
the mess began. Originally, Charles told us that the job would only take 2 days to complete...with walls that would be "as smooth as glass" and "ready to paint". That sounded really fast to me, after seeing what it took Mark to get the wall perfect in the bedroom. But, we believed that since they were professionals and they used "hot mud", that they must be able to work faster. The first day I came home, the guys were still here working. By 5:15, they were out of here, but there was no mud on the walls, just the boards were hung. At that point, we realized that this really was going to take several days. In three days they were, what they 
called, finished. We called them to tell them that they completely for
got to mud certain areas (the screws were still exposed), and many of the places that were "finished" were not smooth at all. So, Charles came back out. But, when I got home that day, I could see that the walls still were not smooth. Mark gave him a call the next day, and he sounded surprised that we were calling. He seriously thought he was done. Mark circled all of the spots we weren't satisfied with (which was practically every place a screw went in the wall, and had him come out one more time. It's no big surprise that even after this last time, the walls were not smooth. They would have to be re mudded and sanded multiple times after that (by Mark). After we got those guys out of our house, Mark and his dad started installing the new
cabinets. This was so nice, because it finally gave us a little more room to breathe in the rest of the house. Until then, cabinets were all over the house, anywhere we could find a place for them. Mark also started building the island. Now, we could finally see the kitchen start to take shape! The next major task we took on was tiling the floor. It actually took us two weekends to complete.To start, Mark poured out this leveling mixture because the floor was sloping downward on the wall where the stove and fridge were going to go. This stuff was so cool! It started setting almost immediately, and with in a couple of hours, we had a perfectly level floor! Next, we started mixing the mortar, which turned out to be one of the hardest parts of the whole job. And, once you've got that stuff mixed, you can't quit until you're through with the bucket! Laying the tile wasn't so bad, except that it killed Mark's knees (even with knee pads). What slowed us down the most was cutting all al the tiles that had to go around the corners and walls. On 
the second weekend, as we were 
just about to be done...we realized that we were going to be 2 tiles short....ha! We can laugh about it now, but after working for about 12 hours straight, this was just about enough to push Mark over the edge! He ended up going up to the warehouse one day in the following week to pick up an extra box to finish the job, and to have a little extra. Once we had it all layed down, we had to go around the room, and scrape out the morter lines, so the grout would adhere to the tiles, and create clean, straight lines. Once that was done, Mark was able to lay the grout pretty quickly, and then he was able to put the sealant on. That's all for now. We're much
further along than these posts show. We should be completely finished by this weekend, then we can post the rest of the pictures. Hopefully, I'll get them up on the site soon.
