{Under Construction} Flooring and Paint

Don't want to miss out on any of our renovation shenanagins? 

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This past week has been a whirlwind of changes in the house.

Let's start out with the most obvious, shall we?

There's no carpet.

Ps- There's no way you've missed that ceiling, right? 

Someone spent a lot of effort on this ceiling. But it's not our style so it'll be painted over shortly. There's a few other murals throughout the house that I'll have to post on here before they get erased.

Last weekend we had a mini-demolition party where my father in law, step dad and Adam tore out the carpet. It was the major culprit behind the stink in the house and once removed, 99% of the odors were gone. The blue tape you see on the floor is where the island will be, and off to the right marked off for our kitchen booth that Adam is going to build.

You can also see that we're missing a few cabinets to the right of the sink - that used to jut out at a 90 degree angle as a little peninsula. We decided that we'd prefer for a run of cabinets to continue along the wall to the french doors, as the little peninsula would get in the way of the flow of the kitchen with the addition of the island.

My step dad also did an amazing job at whipping the yard into shape. The man has a talent. It didn't seem to look that bad when he started, but after a weekend of mowing, weeding and pruning - I don't know how I didn't see it all before. Hidden within the weeds we discovered that I have 3 blueberry bushes, 2 apple trees and a pear tree. Yipee!

After the carpet was torn out, Adam's next move was continuing to build the half wall that will support the raised bar on the island. We used this same concept for our peninsula in our previous remodel so this is turn key for him. He'll be rewiring a little bit to give the island power and routing in plumbing for a small prep sink as well. Gosh, my man is handy.

While he's been working on the big projects, I help with whatever support tasks I can. I had the distinct pleasure in pulling out the staples that were used to keep the pad from shifting under the carpet. That meant about 4 hours of using needle nosed pliers to pull up individual staples. Can't say it was the most glamorous work, but this is one of the biggest ways we save money in carpet replacement - tear out the carpet ourselves and prep the floor for the installers. This time we're working with a wholesaler that keeps large amounts of carpet in stock so we will not have to worry about lead time (last time we went through Lowe's because we thought it was the easiest option, and ended up waiting almost a month for the carpet to simply arrive!).

My other supportive task was to mask off for paint and finish the tiling project that Adam got started for our front entryway.

It originally had a laminate entryway that was demolished from years of abuse. We like tile better and overall the investment for 30 sq ft of tile was about $40. We chose a non-descript almond colored tile from Lowe's and I went for dark grout, which I'm really happy with. The last time we tiled an entry way we matched the grout to the color of the tile (similar to what we have chosen this time), and over the course of a winter the beige colored grout became dingy and no longer uniform, no matter how much I scrubbed. So this time around I decided to be head of the game and make it dark so that we don't have that issue again ;)

Another big project for Adam that will continue throughout the next couple weeks is the hardwood situation in the kitchen and breakfast nook area. Here's what we started out with.

The original hardwood was really beaten up, and in some areas needed boards to be replaced. Unfortunately no one keep unfinished hardwood in stock, so we found some finished oak at Lowe's that was as close of a match as we could get. The most important part was that the the tongue and groove (how the boards fit together) matches up. The biggest pain was that Adam would have to still strip away the finish of the new and the original hardwood, because when we refinish the entire floor we need the old and new to be as uniform as we can get it. It's easier to sand down the new stuff and refinish everything in whatever finish we want versus try to find a finish that will get the original wood to match the new hardwood. Capish?

So here's a comparison of the original vs replacement boards.

So after a day and a half of sanding, we have this:

Looks mostly uniform, but we're not allowing it to bother us too much when there's some really different pieces because we appreciate the uniqueness of it all :)

Adam's final accomplishment of the weekend was that he got started on painting the rooms. The last time we painted we rolled everything on. We had huge entry way that had a crazy 19 ft ceiling and almost all of the rooms had 9 foot ceilings. Everything was rolled on. In the interest of A) our sanity B) time and C) that I can't really help because I can't paint with Penny around, we opted for a paint gun. And after working out a few glitches, Adam was able to get a coat of paint down in about 15 minutes per room! Sweet! Totally worth the investment.

So that's the state of the house in the 10 days of us owning it. >.<