You are currently browsing the tag archive for the 'floor' tag.
We’re getting so close. This past weekend Sean and I hung the cabinets This Old House style and thanks to our neighbor Al, the counters are also installed in the kitchen. Everything is farm house straight:
We also spent a day attending to the yard and putting away materials in preparation for some more excavating work. We are extending our driveway along the house and adding gravel as well as preparing the site for our garage to be built next year. As it turns out, we are also having our septic repaired. (Sigh.)
The project list is shrinking, and we’re feeling the pressure to get the rest of it done… yesterday.
We need some help.
I didn’t have the walls ready to paint this past weekend because I’ve damaged my wrist (at least temporarily) from mudding and sanding. I’m going to keep it wrapped and pop lots of ibuprofen this week and do my best to finish the last coats of mudding in the living room, stairway, and one more bedroom so that all remaining rooms are ready for sanding and paint by Saturday.
If I can hang on and push one more week out of my arm, maybe our sweet little C. will not have to finish the rest of it up for me:
I’m feeling the burn to get this done. Can you help us!? For an hour? Or four?
Needed this Saturday September 26th
- Sanders (first thing Saturday morning!) and Dust Wipers
- Wall Painters (I know you’re all out there! About ninety-eight thousand people have approached me about helping with this in the past six months. The time has finally come.)
- Pressure-Washer Operator (for porch and window trim)
- Cleaning Helpers (to bravely take on The Dust. Vacuuming floors, walls, window sills; wiping cupboards, ceiling fans and light fixtures; washing windows and screens, steam cleaning the couch… everything is filthy. It just has to end.)
- Child Care! Okay A. and L. are too old to need this, but they are usually game for tagging along if you want to take the whole crew. Especially if it means getting out of doing yard work or other manual labor on the house. Or babysitting.
- Meal Preparation and Cleanup. Cook and serve food to our hardworking friends so that we don’t have to stop working except to stuff our faces!
- Roofer to finish installing ridge caps, top the chimney pipe and trim the valley shingle edges
Sean and I need to be able to finish installing floor transitions in two doorways and the wood treads and landings on the steps. The idea is to be ready for floor finishing during the week of Sept. 28 – Oct. 2, and to forge ahead full steam…
Next Saturday, October 3
- Exterior painters for porch and window trim
- Interior trim installers
- Gardeners/Grass planters
- Closet organizer installer
- Window insulator/sill-board installer/caulker
- Child care helpers
- Meal preparation and cleanup
- BONFIRE ATTENDEES! Yes, it’s time for a party. We plan to burn a huge pile of brush and junk wood. (And make merry drinking beer and pop and eating snacks. ) Fire starting around 7-8 PM. Bring your own chair and a song in your heart. Be sure to call us to let us know that you’re coming so that we can talk you into helping us at some point throughout the day too.
If arrangements work out, carpet will be installed upstairs between Oct 5 and 9… and we’ll be ready for the last wave of help by…
October 10
- LARGE ITEM MOVERS! The massively heavy couch (two recliners) is already moved, our giant living room armoire is sold and we are hiring out to move the piano… (“You’re welcome,” to everyone who has ever helped us move!) The bulk of what’s left will be managed in small bites as we go but we’ll need help with a few large items: stove, washer, freezer, desk, dressers…
If you can help with any or all of it, I can’t even begin to tell you how deeply appreciated it would be! We are SO aware that we can’t do it all alone.
If we were sane, we might have listened to the advice of our friends, who at several stages of the tear off said things like, “What I would do, is maybe look into some tile to cover this up.” It was excellent advice. I especially thought that as I nursed blisters on both hands from pulling staples.
When we discovered a few months ago that there was hardwood floor underneath layers of linoleum and plywood, we were determined to scrape everything off of it and restore it, to honor the home and its history.
Well, that and we have no money allocated for tiling another 300 square feet in the house.
So we tore it all out to get back to the original hardwood floor. It was there, hiding beneath layers of linoleum, thin plywood (complete with no less than 800,000 of the longest, most fragile staples ever installed), peel-and-stick linoleum tiles, and a quarter-inch thick layer of black, tar-like adhesive.
The best we could get it to look after scraping off the adhesive remover:
See the staple in the photo above? I saw a hundred of them every time I closed my eyes for days. Every time we thought we had finished pulling every single one out of an area, we would go back over the same area and find three more.
No fewer than five rounds of sanding. We gummed up countless drum sander belts.
I love the discolored, damaged look to the wood. Staple holes, minor water damage, even a few holes patched with tin cans. People pay big money for that “distressed” or “antiqued” finish.
We just had to sweat and bleed a little.
Yes, there’s a hole where the toilet will be! And a hole for the heat duct. The cement board is installed and ready for the tile.
The washer and dryer will be stacked next to the chimney wall, with a linen cabinet to the left of the outlet (between the tub and the washer/dryer).
Not all of the electrical work was finished when the inspector showed up last week, so we can’t finish putting up the drywall quite yet.
Look! A light switch to the right… this is the back of the new bathroom wall. It works a light in the ceiling of the living room where there was no light fixture before.
I realize we’re not changing the face of the planet or anything, but man it feels nice to put something together and turn on a switch and have it work!
The next shot documents some exploratory destruction. We are going to rip out and replace the stairs and we needed to see if we could tear out this little spot for more head room… looks like it used to be a small storage cavity.
Newspapers lined the floor… since 1961. We saw headlines featuring JFK. And Martin Luther King, Jr. marching and getting arrested along with his fellow ‘negroes’.
How do you spell linoleum? Not sure. But Sean tore some out of the big kids’ bedroom. I wonder if we should be trying to spell asbestos…
