Excitement and Fear

After an apparent long standstill during which I've been working constantly with little to no change in the appearance of the house things have started to accelerate.  First the insulation, which took about a week, and now the blueboarding has started.  I'm excited to finally see noticeable progress with the walls getting closed up, but for the past week I haven't been able to shake this gripping fear that I've missed something. Have I overlooked some crucial step that I should have taken before covering up all the work that's been so far.

With that paranoia driving me I spent this past weekend going through the entire house again and again making lists of every little thing that I could do before closing up.  I took a personal day on Monday to be there for the delivery of the blueboard, to meet with the plasterer, talk to the inspector at the insulation inspection, coordinate a dumpster delivery to not interfere with blueboard delivery, talk with the insulators when they did their final clean up and touch up, do all those jobs on my paranoid list.

My Personal Day:

5:30 AM (Monday): -10 F.  Car barely starts.  Go turn on heat then get a coffee.
After that it was a blur.  Here's what I remember:
Framed attic kneewalls to hide ducts but provide access doors to key spots. 
Built in shelves, nooks and crannys, window seat to hide HVAC and chimney.  The attic may turn out to be the coolest room in the house.
Caulked all sill plates and double studs in walls.
Foamed spots missed by insulation crew and trimmed excess foam from areas where I got carried away with their Hilti foam gun.
Blueboard and plaster delivered - truck showed up early in the am and couldn't get up driveway.  I tried to get Jeff to sand it.  No luck.  Tried to go to his gravel pit to get my own sand.  Everything frozen.  Ken was on his way and luckily had 2 buckets of sand in his truck.  Blueboard delivery went smoothly after that.
Dumpster delivered.
Passed insulation inspection and talked about what to do about firming up family room wall.
Loaded foam scraps into dumpster with dad.  Ran around in it for a while to pack it down some: Exhausting.
Ran thermostat wire from ERV to bedroom just in case.
Straightened a couple bowed studs in the front hall.
fell though the ice up to my shins in the back yard while trying to break the ice dam to get the water to drain away from the house.
Ate breakfast at 5:30. lunch at 3. never ate dinner.
Cleaned attic and picked up house to prep for blueboarders starting Tuesday.
The insulators never showed- claimed their trucks had trouble with the cold.
Gave up before reframing the wall in the kids' bathroom for recessed shelves and just hoped they wouldn't blueboard it first.  I got lucky and was able to do that today.
12:30 AM (Tuesday): -8 F. Came home and spent another 1/2 hour looking at weather forecasts on the computer hoping for a snow day Thursday.


Enough text, here are some pics.

Central vac rough-in in the dining room/family room wall.

Insulating in progress.

Proof that the foam finds every little nook and cranny.  This is what squeezed through some studs.

The expanding foam on the garage-house wall pushed the blueboard right through the screws and bent it into the house.

My ever-growing glacier.  Best guess: 12-18" of ice/water thick.  Sanding it is useless since the sand gets buried in a few hours.

Would this be classified as a stalactite or stalagmite?

No dumpster yet.

The marshmallow attic ceiling.

The physics nerd in me was amazed that the center of gravity wasn't shifted far enough to make the whole rig tip over.

50 pounds of plaster (dry weight) per bag.  Approx. 100 bags in the house. ~5000 lbs.

5/8" drywall - 105 pounds per sheet (Answers.com).  Approx. 40 sheets in the garage. ~4000 lbs.

1/2" drywall - 82 pounds per sheet.  Approx. 250 sheets in the house. ~20,500 lbs.  For a grand total of nearly 30 THOUSAND pounds of material just loaded into the house.  And that's not including the water that'll be added to the plaster.  This is why I'm glad I'm not installing it all myself....

More bags of plaster.  Notice the foam cutting "sword" made from a hockey stick and a 3-foot length of band saw blade.

Who says you need a pick up truck?  You just have to be willing to put up with a slightly tilted drive home from Home Depot.

Attic kneewalls.  Access doors for blower and ERV.   Window seat to the right.

Kneewalls around the chimney and the braced and reinforced kneewall at the top of the stairs.

Physics nerd speaking again: Here's proof that aluminum conducts heat WAY better than wood or foam.  Below zero outside. 60 degrees inside.  The little bit of humidity in the house formed a thick layer of frost on the fine edge of the aluminum door pan inside the house.