Sheetrock

The crew has been putting up Sheetrock for the last week, and it's almost complete. Rooms are really starting to look like rooms. Yesterday I met with Eric to walk through a few design details that we hadn't clarified on paper.

The first floor ceiling is covered in bead board and false beams spaced about four feet apart. Mark, Eric and I all had the same general idea with small variations. From the beginning, I wanted to make sure that the beams looked substantial. A lot of design details and materials are false, or more for show than function...and I'm O.K. with that. But, the "false" has to look real and "functioning" as if it was real. In the case of my ceiling beams, I wanted to make sure that they looked hefty enough to actually support the second floor. Early in the design process we had discussed 8" to 10" deep beams, but I'm glad I still had the option of changing the size. Eric mocked up two beams: one as we originally discussed and one 7" deep with the appropriate proportion deep, and that's what I decided to go with. The bigger beam would have been really heavy looking and probably oppressive overhead.

Eric also proposed a small be lovely beaded detail for the lower corners of the beam. Mark, thinking about visual quality, also proposed a flat board to trim the wall where it meets the ceiling and give the beams a logical end point against the wall. In my mind, it will also give us a logical, crisp place for the wall color to change to the ceiling color. It's going to look beautiful.

So, the next step is for the painters to start by priming the walls this coming week and painting the first coat. Then the floors will go down and the window and door trim applied before the third coat of paint for the walls. Apparently painting this way makes things move much quicker. Doors and some trim have even been painted off-site at their workshop.