I'm looking forward to seeing the finished pictures as well...lol.
I'm really, really happy with how the drywall finish ended up. We were pretty worried about the job the first guy was doing but, he was a friend's dad and we were trying to give him some time to fix stuff. Some of his float looked great and we felt like maybe it would be OK but, there was a lot that didn't get done right and I'm worried we're going to see some cracking in the future. Stuff like not fully filling the gaps in corners and joints before taping them, putting the tape on some joints with the crease facing out and using paper tape on butt joints instead of fiberglass, both of which created big humps that took a lot of float to hide. He also did a horrible job with the corner beads, we pulled them all off and redid them the night after he put them on, staying up until 2:00 AM and then getting up at 6 that morning. A lot of the worst of it is in the closet or at the ceiling joints so it either won't really be seen or we can hide it with crown. After we saw what was going on, we had a talk with him and his work improved some but, we still went ahead and mixed some 45 minute mud and filled all the rest of the gaps and covered the screws. Our work wasn't nearly as good as the professionals we ultimately brought in but, it was better than what he was doing. Given enough time and not having injuries, I think we could have probably finished the drywall ourselves. It would have been a learning experience with the float and skim but, I'm pretty confident it would have looked good at the end. The thing is though, that bad drywall can make a well built house look cheap and good drywall can make a badly built house look like quality. Now that we've found a good crew, we're going to use them for the rest of our drywall, especially with the hard deadline on getting things ready for Savannah's arrival. I can't do work nearly as good as them and certainly not as fast, they guy has 19 years of experience though so he should be better than me. Even with all that experience, this job was the first time he'd ever done a Brocade texture (what's on the ceiling). I had to pull up a couple of YouTube videos to show him the technique and he nailed it. It's kind of cool to be at this stage in something that we've done everything in except for the HVAC and the drywall finish, it's now starting to look like a real house inside. The coolest thing is that other than the HVAC and drywall finish, there have never been more than 3 people on the job site and a lot of it I've done alone. I feel like I've really accomplished something.
Other than the finish electrical and plumbing, building the bathroom cabinets and helping my wife with the floors, I'm pretty much done with my part now. It should speed up a lot since she doesn't really need my help to finish.
Sorry if I've repeated myself, I can't always remember what I've said since the accident, it's given me some memory and speech issues. I could re-read my post to make sure I'm not but, I'm too lazy to do that so I'll just conditionally apologize instead.
Eddie - I'm very glad to hear that your wife has beat her illness. We've lost close friends and family members to cancer, I HATE it. I pray (sincerely) that her recovery is complete and permanent.