Of walls and floors....

Since we successfully won the war against the mold, it's time to put the walls all back together again! For the walls, we put in new insulation, sprinkled liberally with boric acid powder (bugs can't get through it), stapled on vapor barrier, and finally put up the new drywall. It's starting to look like an actual house! 

Also, the guest room had this nice hole in the floor before, from the electrical and plumbing work.

It made floor-to-floor tool-handing mighty convenient, but was difficult to walk on. Not only did Jack put it back together, but he leveled the floor too (like unto much of the stuff in the house, one joist was an inch lower than the others).

We also wanted to soundproof between this, the guest room, and the bedroom we're using as the office, which is right next to it. We looked into a few different things, but they were all expensive. Then, at the ReStore, we found a package of ceiling tiles for $8! What a great idea; we hadn't thought of that. We had to buy a few more to make it all the way, but they're not even that much at Home Depot - about $4 a tile.

Then we double-drywalled with two different thicknesses of drywall, which helps absorb different wavelengths of sound, making it even more effective.

In the attic, not only does putting in the insulation accomplish the purpose of actually insulating the attic, but it also gets the huge bundles of insulation out of the basement. 

It's also really helping with the temperature in the house. God really provided with the price of this too: We'd bought it at Home Depot, but when we got the checkout they didn't take our coupon for 20% off. We got it anyway because we thought we needed it right away (turned out we didn't). Later that day we were at Lowe's, and found that the same exact insulation was on clearance there, for about $15 less per bundle. Then, when we checked out, they took the Home Depot coupon at 10% off! We saved a bundle. (har har). Praise God! :)

Oh, and a final note about the drywall: mostly a chance to toot my proverbial horn because I am not exactly known for my upper body strength, but in this case I was actually able to help (still not sure how we managed). We had two 12-foot lengths of drywall (getting in home in the truck was a fun ordeal in and of itself):

which we had to get up here:

That was interesting. We made it, but I wonder how many of the neighbors were laughing watching us (okay, me; Jack looked perfectly fine as usual) struggling with those. It's all about the memories, huh? :)

Cost:
Insulation: $362 (saved about $60 with coupons)
Vapor Barrier: $10
4 bottles of Boric Acid Powder: $13
Ceiling tiles to soundproof: $6 for case; $16 for 4 more at HD 
Drywall: $173 (saved about $40 with coupons)