Flooring Update.

The last coat of poly was put on the floors today. In a mere 48 hours our living room furniture will be set up! Exciting stuff. We decided to go with a pickling stain to keep everything nice white and bright. After the initial meeting with the flooring guy, Jim, we weren't sure if the floor color would even out after sanding because of what he said was water damage in the past...but it did. So the pickling was officially a go.

These are some before pictures of the floor. We thought the original floors were pine, but Jim told us they were vertical grain fir.

P patched in the areas where walls and chimneys used to be with cherry and birch. The dark stripes on the floor are the areas that Jim said was water damage from the past.

Busy enjoyed those dirty old floors.

And here is the after. Now we just have to paint those stairs!

It definitely did not get quite as white as we were expecting, but we like the light but warm and clean look.

P analyzing. I love the variation and imperfections that show up in the old wood. Now if I can just walk on it without looking down to see if I messed anything up.

There are a couple of spots that I think we are going to get Jim to come and buff out, but overall I am loving it!

It's Go Time.

This is happening at my house right now! So excited.

I like to kill trees.

Almost one year ago I ripped up the nasty gross linoleum downstairs. Luckily, only the area next to the front door was left with yucky paper underlayment (well, and the addition, but that's another story). Embarrassingly, I only recently dealt with getting rid of that underlayment. Is underlayment a word? Cause it's showing up as misspelled. Whatever.
Anyway, so this is what it looked like. Yuck.

Well, as part of "operation floor" (more on that later), I took care of it. After some googling I determined that the way to rid our floor of this paper was simply to make it wet. Like super wet. Like soak it in water. I decided the easiest way to do this would be to use my best friend paper towels. Cause I like to kill trees. Kidding.
And it worked! (ps. Is googling also not a word? It should be.)

After soaking an area with a wet paper towel for a couple of hours the paper came up like butta'. Yep, I just said that. Then a quick wipe down with goof off and a soapy water rinse and like magic you can see the wood again.

Yay! Now I just have to do the addition. Booooo.

Stay tuned for a hopeful update on patching in those holes in the floor so it can be refinished!

Framing begins.

Now that the bulk of the demo is done (and been dragged away in a massive dumpster) we have even more framing to do that we originally thought. We have to start with a few key walls in both bathrooms so our plumber can (finally!) get started.

Porky found a safe spot to lay on one of my many birthday gifts. Cement board for the bathroom!

My dad helped us pry up the newer flooring underlayment so that the new tile will be closer to the level of the hardwood in the hallway. The area under the toilet was part rotted and part missing, so we cut a clean edge to easily replace the two layers.

The first layer of plywood cut to size and put in.

Then the second layer using scrap pieces we had laying around from the kitchen window re-framing.

This is my excuse for why everything takes so long. Dogs. Maybe they think they are helping?

This is about as far as we got before there was a knock, no, a banging on our front door. Of course we already knew who it would be...our friendly neighbor Tommy. Now, when I say friendly, what I actually mean is "he hates our guts". This is only something we had guessed, and was confirmed last night when he informed us that he is "sorry you *expletive people ever moved in". Well, ok then. Point taken, we will no longer be doing any work on the house that makes any kind of noise past 7pm. Awesome. Guess what I will be doing tomorrow morning before work? Yeah.

We are getting stuff done...I promise!

So, barring any unforeseen disasters we have locked in a crash pad that we will be moving into in 5 weeks-ish! I am pretty darn excited about it.



I'm sorry, we would like to interrupt this regularly scheduled programming to bring you an important announcement:


Ok, ok, so it's not really an important announcement. I started this post the other night and took a break from writing to veg in front of the tv. As I am chillaxin' watching the Julia Roberts movie marathon (because I am awesome) P walks downstairs to take the dogs outside. Not 5 minutes later he screams my name...followed by something something Porkchop. His panic mixed with hearing Porky's name pretty much sent me flying off the couch and down the stairs...by that time I had also deciphered the word "skunk". Shit. So I ran the flashlight to P and he headed out in the backyard. By now you can probably seen where this is going. I don't think I have ever shared the fact that skunks live somewhere near our house. We have never seen them, but sometimes we will smell the delighful odor drifting in our window when we are going to sleep, or before we wake up in the morning. I had tried to figure out where the skunk den might be, but between the varying types of crap in a couple of our neighbors "back yards" and the fact that the little boogers are noctural...I couldn't figure it out. Anyway, back to Saturday night, so P finally got Porky back in our yard (he had completely busted through the fence). Not knowing if the skunk would come back for more, we had to bring the pup into our house. Instantly, stink filled the downstairs. Awful. Horrible. Yuck. Porky knew he had done something wrong, so he plopped himself on the floor and hung his head in shame. We scurried about to remedy the situation, and quickly learned that we did not in fact stock tomato juice in our household..why would we? So P ran out to the store, while I tried not to die from the smell. Yuck. P quickly returned and I immediately looked down at the bag and exclaimed "what is that!?". "Tomato sauce". "I said to get tomato juice! Whatever, we will just water it down". Step 1: tomato sauce/juice bath. As the tomato juice is "soaking in" I do a little googling and find that tomato juice actually only masks the odor. Great. Step 2: Peroxide/Baking Soda/Dish soap mixture bath (we replaced vinegar with peroxide). This was apparently invented by a chemist and will strip the skunk oil (gross) from the fur. Step 3: Regular doggie bath, because who wants to smell like vinegar.


Ok, doggie isn't radiating smell anymore (although it is hard to tell, because all outside the house smells terrible! Sorry neighbors!). Went to sleep trying not to die from smell wafting in from outside...why oh why is the smell so strong? It's never been that strong before.


Let me tell you why. We wake up in the morning to go out and check the situation in the light. As I expected from the intense overnight smell the little Pepe Le Pew had perished. My sweet little gray pup is a killer. Feelings of guilt overwhelmed me. On our way to the pet store to pick up remedy #4 (because when you bend down close to him he still stinks). Gross. I made a call to animal control to come and remove the evidence of the awful night..."we can't come onto private property" they say. Oh goodie. So, as you can probably guess P and I had the pleasure of removing the little guy off of private property for the pick-up. Yuck. FYI my guilt went away mostly upon a closer view of the little thing...his face was anything but cute.


It did't look like this:


It looked more like this:


Kind of frightening. So, Porkchop made it to work today and no one has walked by my desk, sniffed the air and said "ewwww it smells like skunk"...so we are doing well. Oh, and our house no longer smells. Yay!

Well, if anyone is still reading after that long winded story here are some pics from the last couple of weeks. More pictures from this weekend (actually just Sunday around 5 pm once we finally recovered from the skunk extravaganza) to come.

New gloves! We both got a pair and really like...plus, they make us look sooo cool.

This...

was covering this in the door mini vestibule.

Work continued on the baby door that leads into the basement.

Sanded to a smooth finish...still didn't reach all wood, but since we are painting I thought that was ok. Now we just need to do some patching and a little more sanding!

This is sort of old news...I just haven't shared! We scored this great 12x24 stone tile from the rep at Stone Source. The plan is to put it in the addition when we rebuild...which will probably be in the very very distant future. Sad. It is going to stink just staring at this stuff until then because I love it! Did I mention it cost us zero dollars? Love! Thanks again Stone Source!

Whew! That's all for now. I promise next time will be more house work...less complaining about the latest doggie shenanigans.

ps. More later on the new apartment...Pepe kind of threw me off and I totally lost any thoughts about what I was going to actually write in this post!

A new old floor and the Tool of the Year Award.

We picked up work on the gross linoleum flooring this weekend. Despite many hours of back breaking work over the past two weeks, by this past Saturday the floor still looked like this:


After meeting with one of the contractors on Friday we gave in and decided to try the heat gun method. What could it hurt? I was going to try and find a rental, but he suggested just purchasing one since it might end up being roughly the same cost. After a quick trip to the evil HD we came home with this:

One word. Amazing. Work then started moving at a much quicker pace. I started thinking "wow, I may not even be sore after this like I have been over the past week". Wrong. While the heat gun sped things up considerably I still had to spend a lot of time bent over in knee pads. Very sore. Complaints about my sad achy fingers and toes (that's right, fingers and toes) aside this little tool performed like a champ. If anyone out there ever needs to remove a layer (or 2) of liloleum from wood flooring, and I am sorry if you do, then this is the way to go. We were previously sponging on adhesive remover and prying each tile up. Effective, but slow, and required a lot of muscle. The heat gun warmed the adhesive under each tile so that we could then slowly peel it up. After the heat gun worked it's magic we then had to go back over the floor with the adhesive remover and then mop...which we still probably need to do again, cause it's still a wee bit sticky. To whoever decided to put not one, but two layers of this crap on top of perfectly fine wood floors I DO NOT like you. Hmpf.

Progress shots:

Yay! No more linoleum (downstairs). We got all of the tiles up, but are still dealing with some kind of weird paper backing in the front hall. So gross. It will be up before the end of the week so I can show it off to my mom and godmother who are coming up for a week at the Cape!!! So excited.

Projects and Puppies!

Over the past week:

We decided it was time to tear up some linoleum after getting the asbestos test back negative (yay!).

So I put on my sweet knee pads and tore some shit up.

Then P tore some shit up, he was too cool for knee pads so I stole his (they were better).

Ok, I promise we have done more than this...but not much. Ripping up will resume tomorrow. Ugh.

I decided for some reason it was time to strip the mini door that leads down to the basement. Over the years it has been blessed with I don't know how many layers of paint and one layer of super awesome wall paper.

I am thinking one more coat of stripper and some more elbow grease and we might actually get down to the wood (you can see it peeking through in some spots!).

And of course, lots of puppy lounging! So cute.