Costs and "Thoughsts"

(yeah, I just post Thoughsts cause it rhymed)

I'm getting to a couple key junctures in the project now:
-the point now when I'm going to have to start doing some of the work finish work myself
and
-the point when I have to make some decisions I've been putting off for a while.

Sometime next week it's going to be painting time. Previously I was thinking, "Painting's really not gonna be so tough." Then I was in the garage on the first floor a few weeks ago and looked up at the 12 foot cielings, with bulkheads and other things jutting out of it around the metal beams and decided it might not exactly be a "cakewalk":


Luckily a lot of people have been awesome enough to offer to help me, so I think the painting should end up being alright. Enough people have said they'd help that people don't have to spend the whole day helping me or anything to get it done. A few hours from each person will be great though.

After the painting gets done then comes the flooring. I'm not sure if I've mentioned it before on here, but my plan is to install a floating cork floor with the help of my mom and somebody else. This somebody else I hope to either have be a friend who has installed hardwood floors before, or maybe the overseer at the site, Otto. I'm going to use two types of cork: a darker cork in the livingroom and bedroom areas, and a lighter cork in the kitchen. The cork comes in 1'x3' tiles that snap together sort of like those crappy fake food pergo floors do. The tiles have a cork layer on the top that's somewhere between a 1/4" and a 1/8", then the loocking material which lets you snap the tiles together, and then another 1/4"-1/8" layer of cork underneith. They're supposed to provide very good insulation and warmth to the feet, which will be great to have considering that the garage underneith isn't heated for the most part.

Here is one of the layouts I'm considering:


I need to make the decision on exactly how many square feet of the cork to get very soon because it needs to be ordered.

Hopefully the following problem is done with, but I was having some issue before with water seeping into the windows along the side of the first floor. We saw as the drywall was being put in that this was leaking rain water, and I saw once again when the drywall was in that it was still leaking. For a while the contractors couldn't figure out what it was, but as it turns out, we think it was a combination of:
-pieces of the house wrap (basically a raincoat for the house) overlapping in a way such that water could fall between them and get channelled into the wall
and
-the siding and flashing not being installed yet.

Here's a pic of the damaged drywall I took just in case the issue cropped up again:


There are tons of lights I need to buy still... and I have to try and figure out how to do that in a way that's financially reasonable.

But for now, it's tme for sleep.