A ceiling, an honest to God ceiling.

She's never hit the lottery. She's never won big at the casinos. Lets face it, we're lucky if we get the smallest prize on the scratchers we buy once every two years or so. So, given this spectacular track record of winning in our family, for Wifey yesterday must have been like winning the grand prize.

What the hell am I talking about? Well, you may recall my documentation of the great bathroom renovation. You may even recall how way back in February I spoke about my wife's herculean ability to live without certain creature comforts while our home was a war zone. One of the things that was lacking, and was still lurking when I declared the project "complete," was the absence of a ceiling in our dining room. Well, that is no longer the case. Thanks to an amazing friend, and parent of said friend, we now have an honest to God ceiling in our dining room. Thanks to Drew and Rob (a.k.a. Paco) for coming over last night to assist with the install of the big pieces.

In the interest of full disclosure, the ceiling is by no means done. All of the Sheetrock is up but the mudding and taping still need to be done. If you have any personal knowledge about such endeavors you might know that the mudding and taping is often the most difficult part, and it is certainly the most difficult to make look really nice for those of us who consider ourselves just skilled enough to get ourselves into trouble. It takes time to do right, lots and lots of practice. If you have this skill there is often very little you have to do afterward, such as sanding all the little bumps off. If you are like me, and you need to Spackle the hell out of everything the sanding becomes much more extensive and creates a MUCH larger mess. When you sand off joint compound (Spackle) it creates a very fine dust that goes absolutely everywhere. When I was redoing my bathrooms this was not an issue. I put up a sheet of plastic, turned on the air cleaner and wore a mask and I could sand away all of my mistakes. The dining room is quite another matter. If I do this part, it will be the biggest mess ever. This is exactly the reason I haven't jumped on this part of the project earlier. I knew this finishing work would hang over my head and I don't feel up to the task. So, I'll be contacting the contractor that fixed up Drew's house nice and purty after the whole tree-through-the-roof incident and hopefully he will be able to do what I can't with much less mess and in a timely fashion. It will definitely be worth the $200.

Just as an aside, I thought it might be funny to investigate this a little bit... I started the project on February 22, 2007. That was when I first took the ceiling down in the dining room.

Some pictures from last February:

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And now some pictures from last night... There is Drew and Paco, then the horrible mess, then the finished product. Yes, the finished product at 11:30 at night, but it is "finished" nonetheless.

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So, just to see how ridiculously long it took me to get this dang ceiling put up (again, scared of the mess of the sanding but now that Wifey is agreeing to let a pro do it, it was time to git 'er dun) I plugged that date into a web site I found, Time and Date.com, and found the following info:

Duration calculation results

From and including: Thursday, February 22, 2007
To and including: Monday, September 8, 2008

It is 565 days from the start date to the end date, end date included

Or 1 year, 6 months, 18 days including the end date

Alternative time units 565 days can be converted to one of these units:

• 48,816,000 seconds
• 813,600 minutes
• 13,560 hours
• 80 weeks (rounded down)