Dry Wall, Water/Sewer, and Some Local Publicity

Two big things happened on the house front over the past week or so. The most visible is that the drywall is now up. This completely changed the look and feel of the interior. The least visible, but most problematic (because of rock), is that the sewer and water lines are now connected to the house. In addition, perhaps the most interesting aspect of the past week was the publicity we received from the local papers and television news.



Let's start with the drywall.  After being able to see through all the walls for so many months, it is  quite a change to have the drywall in place.  I was surprised by a couple of aspects of this process.  First, there was a LOT of drywall.  They delivered it on a huge truck with a crane attached so they could send it through second floor windows.  There was so much drywall in the house, it was hard to get around.  The second surprise was that it goes up quick.  Within two days, everything was up on the ceilings and walls.  It probably took another week to do the taping, filling, and sanding, but the actual process of putting it on the walls is pretty fast.  The third surprise was just how messy the process is.  Of course, they did a pretty good job of cleaning up when they were done, but for a while there it looked like a bomb had gone off inside the house.

Drywall being installed (Click image for more photos.)

The second major recent event was getting the water and sewer lines hooked up to the house.  We thought this might be a pain because of the location of the water and sewer hook-ups in relation to the house.  It was pretty clear that there was going to be some rock to dig through to get the lines installed and as expected, they hit a ton.  This slowed the process down considerably and was followed by some heavy rains which caused the trench to cave in, slowing the process down even more.  Eventually, we had some dry weather and they were able to get the lines connected to the house.

Putting in the sewer line (Click image for more photos.)

The last item of interest was some unexpected publicity.  Dickinson College has a major sustainability initiative and I had contacted them about doing a story for the college's weekly news "extra."   While I have yet to hear back from them regarding that, someone in the college's public relations department read the blog and thought the local news media might be interested.  The next thing I know, we have two interviews scheduled for the local papers and a television news crew planning to visit the house.  After all the effort that's gone into this project, it was kind of fun to get a little press.  Hopefully, the publicity will inspire other new-home projects to add a few energy efficient features that weren't already planned.

Front page news! (Click image for more photos.)

All in all, I must say that I was impressed with the reporters.  They asked a lot of good questions and we gave them a ton of information.  Of course, these were short stories so there is not a whole lot of room for technical details.  Thus, as you might suspect, there are a few things that make us cringe a bit when we read them.  But all in all, I think they did a good job and it was a lot of fun.  The Carlisle Sentinel's article was front page news and can be read online at www.cumberlink.com.  The Patriot News article was on page A5 and can be read online (without photographs) at www.pennlive.com.  The abc27 television news story can be seen at www.whtm.com, although they do make you watch commercials first.  We taped the segment and I put up a commercial free version on youtube that you can watch below.