Never As Planned

No matter what type of project I am doing at my house, I always expect things to go a lot quicker than they do and to be able to get a lot more done within a time frame than I actually can.  As I mentioned yesterday, I am working on the stairwell/hallway in my house.  It is a small area, the stairs taking up most of it and a landing at the top that I like to call a hallway.  I guess what I should really do is just call it a stairwell.  In any case, the large amount of work that I wanted to get done yesterday didn't exactly go as planned.  If you recall, I wanted to get to sheetrocking and skim coating by last night.  That didn't happen.  I forgot to calculate into my grand plan that I am dealing with a really old house that is not level anywhere and has weird corners and angles everywhere.  So yesterday was spent mostly figuring out how to re-frame the ceiling while still supporting the roof above.  The trickiest part, and the part that took my the longest to work through, is the portion of the ceiling where a roof valley runs through the ceiling.  Here is why it does that.  The second floor of my house, as I mentioned yesterday, has shorter ceilings than a normal house, in fact, they consider it a half floor instead of a full second floor.  As such, the ceilings in all the rooms are flat only in the middle for about 7 feet before sloping down on the sides towards short walls that are about 4 feet tall.  Well, the slope of the ceiling is what is delaying my framing in the hallway.  In the majority of the area that I am working on, the ceiling as flat.  However, there is one corner where, as I mentioned, a roof valley runs through, creating two different slopes in one corner of my stairwell/hallway.  This is the area where they added on to the house at some point years ago.  Despite the frustrating angles I have to deal with and the weird framing that is going into the ceiling, I am slowly getting through it and working on making it look as perfect as possible, which is definitely not easy. 

One part that always amazes me is some of the lumber they used when constructing the original part of the house.  The ceiling joists are 4x4 beams, solid as a rock and almost impossible to drive a nail through.  I just wish they did a better job with plastering the house as I wouldn't have as much work to do when ripping down ceilings and walls and such.  I am just glad that I decided not to rip down the walls and just fix them instead.  In any case, today's goal is to finish the last little bit of framing, insulate, sheetrock, and skim coat.  That is all I want to get done and I think that today I finally have a reasonable goal for myself.  I guess we shall have to wait and see how it all pans out.  Yesterday wasn't a full day unfortunately as I had a couple errands to run, one being a visit to the vet with one of my dogs.  For all those out there who have dogs or cats, NEVER visit the vet on President's Day, NEVER.  It was absolutely chaotic in there and took me a lot longer than I intended.  Such is life.  I worked till about 930 last night when my body said stop.  Up at four and ready to go, as soon as I am done here, I will be getting to work.  For now, that's all I got.  Have a great day everyone.