Mudslinging

It is Saturday and the general contractor's guys are taking the day off. I decided to get a jump start on the finishing below the dome. The lead guy (who is one heckuva nice guy), told me he would help me do the taping and finishing... as in "I'm not like, a taper, but I've done some mud work." Print this out and put it on your refrigerators blogreaders: NEVER LET A CARPENTER DO DRYWALL FINISHING.

Anyway...here is Fr. Jeremy "pre-filling" with a non shrinking compound. This levels out the bad joints and fills the wide gaps in the sheetrock. There's a lot of that due to the difficulty level of the sheetrocking.
This is yours truly running the "bazooka". This machine basically lays a bed of mud and puts the drywall tape on top of it all in one stroke. The entire set up costs about 2000.00, but considering you can do in one hour what someone by hand would take nearly a day to do, it's worth every penny. The downside is it is a back breaker to use. Imagine twirling a twenty five pound baton around for a couple hours or all day when I was a younger and stupider man).

The blue streaks are fiberglass mesh tape on the joints of the sheetrock. The helpers spent all morning putting it on. We also have a special material for finishing the oddball angles on the ceiling called "flex tape". It conforms to any angle...and on this job that's a good thing.
We got a lot of the initial mud work done today. We still have about 25% of the ceilings to do yet (we ran out of gas, motivation and time before Vigil) but I'll probably do those Sunday afternoon... after my Traditional Sunday afternoon nap.)

Instead of attending the Vigil tonight, I took a long walk in the forest around the Monastery. I was a good walk. As much as I like being here I know the "thought" that I could "belong" here is a delusion. Being a pilgrim and a worker for a couple weeks is a far different thing than being called to the monastic life. More on an upcoming podcast on Steve the Builder. Stay tuned.

Good night.