You might remember this past Summer 
If you look really closely, you can see a window next to the air conditioning unit in the lower center of the house. When we hired the contractor to build the new deck, we had him take out that window and cover the hole. In the past that window had been under the upper part of the old deck. The new deck design we decided on would effectively cut that window in half on the horizontal.
Here you can see where the window would have been. Only about the top third of it would have been above the decking though. Since the window was in our furnace room, we didn't really mind that they removed it.
When all was said and done, this is what we ended up with on the inside of our house. I was really impressed with the job that the contractor did. I would totally recommend him to anyone else in our area that was looking for someone.
Not only did he pull out the window and cover it up, he also framed in the old area to make it ready for whatever I decided to put there. Additionally, he put some spray foam around the seams of the particle board and frame to help insulate it.
You might have read in my post here that we have been having some pretty cold weather in my part of the country. Wind chills of -35 F or so to be exact. I knew before those temperatures came I should do a little more to insulate where the window was, so this past weekend I did just that.
I was doing some work on my truck at my friends house on Saturday (I will write a post about that next week) and I asked him if he had what I needed to fix the hole where the window had been.
He sent me home with a couple of pieces of insulation and a half sheet of drywall that he had laying around his shop.
I used the staple gun shown sitting on the window sill and stapled the insulation in place. Luckily the pieces of insulation he gave me were too long since they weren't quite wide enough to fill the hole.
I used and old pair of scissors I keep in the garage and I cut the excess off the bottom of the pieces. Then I took the excess and cut it into the small strips that I took a picture of above. I then used these small strips to fill in the gaps on the sides due to the insulation not being wide enough.
You can see how it turned out in the picture above. It would have been cool if the insulation had fit perfectly, but as most of us know, perfect is a word seldom used in many home improvement projects. The phrase "good enough for who it's for" is one that is more often used when I am trying to tackle something :)
Now that the insulation was in place it was time to tackle the drywall. I had a feeling that the hole for the drywall wasn't going to be exactly square but it was actually closer than I had thought.
After taking measurements at the top and bottom of the opening, I went out to the garage to make my cuts on the sheet my friend had given me.
If you aren't familiar with it, this is a Stanley knife. Also called a box cutter and probably several other names. I once had a contract job for a big chemical company in the town I grew up in. In order to work there I had to go through a series of saftey training courses.
I will never forget in one of the courses they explained that this tool is probably the number one reason for most on job accidents in industrial businesses. I don't know if those statistics are still accurate, but back then they were. They said a large majority of the time you asked a person how they got hurt on the job, they would start their story with "I was using a Stanley knife...".
Needless to say, I made sure to be very careful. The problem is cutting drywall can dull you blade pretty quickly and sometimes a dull blade is even more dangerous than a sharp one.
I measured out my mark on the piece of drywall and then used my square to give myself a guide to cut down with the knife. I first made sure the edge I was resting the guide on was square otherwise I would have ended up with a slanted line.
Finally, I was down to my piece to fill the hole.
But of course, it didn't fit the hole as you can see in the picture above. The bottom and right hand side fit pretty snuggly, but the upper left hand side and the top needed to be shaved down some.
If I were working with my friend I would have used a plane for this type of thing, but all I had was my Stanly knife. As I said, the blade was getting pretty dull even though I opened the knife and flipped it over to use the other side.
What I ended up with was a piece of drywall that fit the hole but left some really jagged and unattractive edges.
You can see the final result above after I used the drywall screws to hold it in place. Notice the bottom right hand corner and the top left hand corners are a bit screwed up from pushing the piece into the opening. Also, there is a small area in the bottom left hand corner that is exposed because the opening wasn't totally square.
As my friend would say though, "that is why they make tape and mud". Sometime in the future he will come over with his tools and we will tape and mud the seams. Then I will use some extra paint I have laying around to paint over the area and make it look a little more presentable. Eventually, I would like to put some brackets on the wall and install some shelves so that
After everything was intalled, I needed to clean up. I tried using the vacuum cleaner we keep in the house, but it wasn't quite powerful enough to pick up the big chunks of drywall. Giving up on that pretty early, I went in the garage and got my wet/dry vac to finish the cleaning job. It is very ackward to carry around, but it picked up the dust and pieces in short order and I was soon able to relax and pat myself on the back for a job well done.
I guess I did such a good job
