House Slippers on a Construction Site

Day sixty-nine. The floor is one day old, and it has already reorganized our behavior: we work in house slippers now, treading our own construction site like respectful guests.

The morning tax. The installers had covered the open field generously, but the perimeter — exactly where our remaining wall-and-putty work happens — needed sealing: cardboard trimmed to the edges, four rolls of protective vinyl tape from Daiso along every wall line, film left over the windows against paint spray. Half a day, gone to protection.

And the lesson filed permanently under sequencing is money: had the walls been fully finished before the floor went in, this entire morning wouldn’t exist. Trades have a correct order; every inversion converts directly into labor.

The precision phase. Wall finishing has entered its fussy endgame — no more square meters, only defects:

• Sanding: the multi-cutter with triangular pads (60 then 120 grit) over every Handycoat patch. Equipment note learned mid-job: if the sandpaper detaches unnoticed, the pad itself grinds away — and a worn pad won’t grip fresh paper. Spare pads ordered.
• Corners get elastic: wide corner gaps — the crack-prone joints where walls meet — got acrylic filler rather than Handycoat, trading sandability for flex where movement lives.
• The noodle trick: for deep skinny gaps no foam nozzle enters, we crushed a silicone-gun tip flat into a ribbon and mounted it on the foam gun — urethane foam now extrudes like a thin noodle, reaching the last thermal leaks. Tiny gaps are disproportionate heat holes; this one’s staying in the toolkit.
• Plywood becomes wall: the living-room ceiling’s plywood closures and light boxes, the bath ceiling, plasterboard staple dimples — all puttied, so that under white paint, wood reads as wall.

And the master bedroom went white — first room to full paint, the campaign now running room by room toward done.