Kitchen Reno: Ending Week 2. Lessons Learned

Week two = two times the fun with drywall! We anticipated needing drywall repair behind the stove after the removal of the ceramic tile back splash and anywhere the electrician needed to remove dry wall to string electrical wire. It turns out he removed a few thin strips in the ceiling and some patches on two walls. We removed a large chunk from behind the stove. Not to bad.

Monday: no drywall crew.
Tuesday: no drywall crew.
Tuesday night: Lisa gets cranky and anxious about time. If drywall doesn't get done on Thursday, we can't paint with my parents on Friday & Saturday. I did not want to try to paint the ceilings and 18 foot walls with cabinets installed. Contractor assures us everything will get done, these guys know what they're doing...and then adds "we're not their bread and butter." This does not put me at ease.
Wednesday: drywall crew arrives. Huge mess.
Wednesday night: all the texture the dry wall crew has sprayed onto the ceiling patches has bubbled up and looks like it's about to fall off. Jamey leaves for a fishing trip.
Thursday: drywall crew returns and scraps bubbling texture off ceiling.
Friday: drywall crew returns again, re-sprays ceiling with a new layer of texture.

We were still able to paint on Saturday. We ended up buying a paint sprayer. This was a great purchase: it made painting the ceiling much easier. However, clean up was a b$%#h. Directions indicated the over spray area to be 2-3 feet. That thing shot paint ALL OVER. My mom and I were on our hands and knees brushing tiny little paint splatters off the tile floors for hours. Note to self: the next time we spray paint, make sure everything is hermetically sealed!

Wall paint is done! I can't believe how much I love a bit of color on a wall! The color is "mushroom bisque" and it already makes the whole space feel so much warmer than the "off-white" previously gracing these walls. My parents insisted we paint behind the fridge. My dad thought we should just go ahead and paint everything, but I insisted painting behind the cupboards was a waste of time and paint. Jamey came home late Sunday night from his fishing trip and the first thing he said about the kitchen was "why didn't you just paint the whole thing?" Did I marry a younger version of my father? WTH?

Lessons learned: 1) have a much better understanding with your contractor: find out if your job will be the main job for a crew during the duration of the project, or if it's a "fill-in" type job for his/her company. In hindsight, we've now figured out that we're a fill-in job. The problem with that, is this is not a fill-in job for us. If I could offer any advice to a contractor it would be: treat every job like it's the most important one you've got going on. What was the point of our contractor telling me our job wasn't "the bread and butter for these guys [dry wall guys]"?  I don't know, but the point I got was that I probably should have hired a different contractor.

2) Construction is dirtier than one imagines and clean up takes forever. I've mopped the floors twice now (once with a mop and once on my hands and knees with a rag) and there still seems to be a layer of construction dust settling.

3) When using a paint sprayer tightly cover everything in a half-mile radius.