Real work!

We actually made a little progress this weekend. Saturday brought the usual catch-up of cleaning, laundry, etc. But on Sunday, we drove over to Harbor Freight, armed with the 15% off coupon we got through One Project Closer and found the pneumatic stapler that we needed-- a 2-in-1 18 ga stapler/nailer for $29. We got to the counter, where the girl thought our coupon was a fake; it wasn't. Apparently there had been a rash of counterfeit HF coupons. Anyway, she scanned the coupon and gave us the grand total of... $18. Not only was the coupon awesome, the stapler was on sale for $19.99. Perfect. And it did the job splendidly. AND it was fun to use.



Then we went to Home Depot to get fake beadboard for the porch ceiling. Unfortunately, they hadn't restocked in the last 6 weeks, so there wasn't enough of the lightweight stuff; the MDF is just too heavy for the ceiling; the cheapo panels are made of composite fiber, so not exactly water-resistant; and the real wood is too expensive. We ended up with water-resistant ultra thin luaun.

And then we discovered that the panels didn't exactly fit into the vehicle we brought. So we went through an exceptionally long fiasco of buying straps and tying it to the roof.

After quite a bit of futzing and fussing and trimming and false starts, we got the plywood up. A little recap: here's how it looked right around move-in:


And here's after we replaced the plywood; you can see that the seams are pretty uneven.
And now, with the luaun:

There will always be a bit of a bow in the ceiling, but it's a vast improvement. The ceiling beams are not parallel, but run at various angles from house to outer edge, so there's not beams for the seams to run along. What we did was run 3 4-foot panels, plus a another foot off a fourth panel, from one end of the porch, then did the same with the luaun, but starting from the other direction. In other words, this means that the luaun seams were staggered in the middle of the plydoow underneath. Does that even make sense? It's 2 layers of wood, but run from opposite ends.

Anyway, by the time we'd hit this point in the project, it was 6pm and all our energy had been spent on tying the damn stuff to the car.

We called it done. We'll add crown next week and I can caulk and then paint everything white; the consistency of color should mask the undulations.

And then...

We screen.