St. John Trip, Day 5

We actually finished the "stealth bomber ceiling" today and started putting up the high sections of the walls (in drywall you do the ceilings first then the walls. Ross and Brother Eamon did the lower parts of the walls while Father Jeremy, (my stepson who has worked for me when he was living at home) and I did the ceilings. With the details around the beams done you can see the complexity of the framing and drywall work a little better. When we finish the lower parts of the walls, we will erect scaffolding and start on the dome and dormer window area.
We also started on the round wall behind the altar.

We started using full sheets of drywall but it was really hard to get it to bend enough and they began breaking because the radius of the wall was a little bit too tight. I didn't want to have to hang the wall in double layers of quarter inch sheetrock, so we set up a makeshift jig to pre-bend the half inch sheetrock overnight.
It is supposed to rain tonight so the moisture in the air and the tension on the sheetrock over night will help it keep the curve until we can screw it to the walls where it will dry out and stay put. The County Building Inspector came by today and "signed off" on the entire sheetrock job even though we weren't even half done yet. She looked up and said, "Whoa...that was a challenge wasn't it?" She said if we did that good a job on the ceilings she's got no doubt we'll do the walls right. It was a nice compliment... my entire body still hurts but my ego feels good.

If we finish the walls tomorrow, I might start the mud work on the stealth ceiling while the guys keep on the sheetrocking since everything from here on is pretty straightforward and square. The taping and mud work will be its own challenge to make everything look straight, square and even.