Perfect Timing

 Well, it's done.  Yep almost everything is done.  More or less we are done.... At least enough to move back into the big house.  It took us exactly 3 months and two days.  This past month has been almost entirely dedicated to the wood floors, well that and cabinets, counter tops, and a whole bunch of other little things.  Ever since the beginning of this massive renovation endeavor I have imagined these floors redone.  I knew we would get here but actually tackling the project that I've had on my mind for two years was very rewarding.

But like anything else it had to go in stages.  The idea has always been to try and make it look like the staircase was always there so it also had to get refinished at the same time.

Step One: Clear away all the crap that is stored in the bedroom and the endless amounts of stray tools and beer cans.

Step Two: Rent big sanding machine.... Return said machine and get the bigger one.


Step Three: Use 60 grit paper to really get down under the 70 year old stain.

Step Four: Break the machine, return, repeat.

Step Five: Repeat step three using different grits of paper til you get that smoothish rustic floor look.

Step Six: Put new treds on the staircase and sand the crap out of them with the handheld, including but not limited to the sides and underneath taking care not to sand all the edges off the steps.... not as easy as you would think.

Step Seven: Clear away beer cans.

Step Eight: Bring home the smaller corner sander, proceed to sand the corners and all the other little stuff you missed.

Step Nine/Ten: Vacuum. Clean. Vacuum.

So the floors were ready to take some stain!  Both an exciting and terrifying moment.  It's not like paint where you could just slap another colour over it if you don't like it.  After all that work sanding I wasn't about to restart.... So with a deep breath it was go time....

Oh. My. God. It's f-ing red!!!!! 

I panicked.... I'm not proud of that moment but I cried.... Hard.  My devastation couldn't be seen by the world, I kept it to myself and cried harder.  We had done so many tests, and it still wasn't the right colour I was dumbfounded, but I couldn't stop either.  I had to dig deep and just 'keep swimming' (in my ocean of sawdusty tears, hahaha).

• Wipe away tears
• Rally
• Stain Staircase
• Continue throughout the rest of the project with a beer fueled rage

The next day it was time to start the first of three coats of polyurethane.  I remember walking into the room of my crushed renovation dreams... as I hadn't slept all night I teared up right away, but this time in relief.  They weren't red anymore they were exactly what they were supposed to be!  Thank you stain gods and colour fairies!  Days later I finished the floors and finally it was time to start getting organized for countertops and kitchen plumbing.

Before we could really get going on the finishing of the kitchen I had to clean the house.  Seriously clean, that dust from sanding the floors got into everything!  We did our best to keep it controlled but it was impossible. If I've learned anything about renovation I've learned that cleaning is half the job.

It took a day but it got done and we moved back in on March 31st, 2015.  Many things still need to be completed including baseboards, trim, the island countertop, bathroom door... etc...  Finding a place for everything is my next goal, so pinterest has become my favorite time waster recently.  Reclaiming the house doesn't just give us all our privacy back but I get my studio back and Jeremy gets his shop back.  Now if the snow would just stop coming down there is a whole list of things to do in the yard too.  Including but not limited to: New roofs for all three buildings, a deck, flower beds, garden beds, fire pit reno, blah, blah, blah.

Ground Up

Lately I have been feeling a little dizzy, I'm not sure if it's due to exhaustion or excitement but since all I do is feel dizzy I suppose it really doen't matter.  We have been plugging away at the endless number of tasks to bring this renovation hell to a close... we are not even close yet, but closer than last month I suppose.  Its time to turn our sights to the floor and get er' done.

Before the floor could be laid Jeremy had to fix a rather large gaping hole in the floor and build a new access to the crawlspace.  This ended up working out because our back ordered flooring we purchased never did show up at least not in time for us.  We cancelled our order and found some other stuff.  To be completely honest I'm really not that picky about the floor... actually I really couldn't have given a darn.  Jeremy kept asking me and sending me photos from the stores asking me which one I liked best and in the end it only took me telling him 12 times that "I DON'T CARE!  As long as it's not gray, or dark, or cheap, or fake looking...."  Hahaha indecisive through and through.  In the end it's just laminate, and in a studio to boot, so whatever.


With the flooring stacked in neat little piles, I was excited to get started and use some power tools!  I have wrestled with a fear of saws since a kid in my grade 12 year cut off three of his fingers and I saw him running through the school dripping blood and yelling... But I'm also ready to overcome this irrational fear and get sawing.  That is when Jeremy dropped the bomb on me... He wanted to do the floor because his OCD would never abate if I messed it up.  So after a split second of disappointment I shrugged and went to go read a book and have a cup of tea (I mean if he really wants to do it, who am I to argue? It was a good book).

But as per renovation law things had to snowball... Like building a brick wall, one brick HAS to come before another or it all falls down.  So, with financial tap-out looming, we had to purchase both toilet and vanity for the bathroom so a layout could be planned and proper holes for the plumbing drilled.  Also we had to purchase interior doors (on back order until who knows when, dammit) for the finishing of trim and transitions between rooms to be properly installed.  The finishing sure adds up, little things that seem so insignificant at the beginning of a project, but are vital to a completed one.

I've taken another job here in middle of Nowhere, Saskatchewan...which brings the grand total up to 5.  Yep, I have 5 part-time on-call jobs outside the house, renovation hell (studio), and somehow a stay-at-home mom?  They include :

• Teachers Aid (on call)
• School Secretary (on call)
• Librarian (on call)
• Janitor at the Fitness Gym (free membership!  When I can use it is still to be seen)
• Bartender (the newest on the list, I mean who needs sleep?)

But all whining aside, I'm very happy with our progress this far and very proud of Jeremy's laminate skills (I still think I could have done it).  Upcoming pressing matters include (since I'm in a list-type of mood):

• Back porch lino (already got it, just need to clear the area and get it done)
• Finish window trims (need more trim, pick up tomorrow)
• Base boards (pick up tomorrow with window trim and then paint it...)
• Plumbing in toilet, vanity, and outside tap (for the garden I didn't mean to plant)
• Rough in plumbing for tub and kitchenette sink
• Buy another case of beer and finish writing this list.

Yeah enough lists, it's disheartening.  I just noticed my calendar by the computer is still on January... no wonder I forget so much stuff...  Well that is all for now.

What Lies Beneath

Well, the most important thing to do to our new house was to make it livable.  This basically required a bathtub full of bleach, and stack upon stack of sponges.  I actually thought the walls and fixtures were different colours... Ewwww.  Anyhow, the carpet was obviously the biggest source of the smell, so the day before we moved in, Jeremy and I tore it all out.

So, whenever you buy a house this old (somewhere between 75-85 years) you can be optimistic that there will be some happy surprises along with a lot of "WTF?" moments.  Today was a happy surprise day, for under the carpet we discovered this.

 The hardwood is pretty awesome; and with the living room carpet out, the smell in the house at this point was beginning to reach a tolerable level. Luckily, Jeremy and I both had colds and couldn't smell much... but we could still pick up the unique odor that permeated the entire house, a smell borne of decades of cigarette smoke, non-existent building maintenance, and (cannot emphasize this enough) poor, poor housekeeping practices... it was everywhere!




I wish we (Jeremy) could have just pulled the staples out of the floor and that would be it... a big shout out to Kirby for helping out by the way!  Unfortunately, remember those "WTF?" moments I was talking about? Well, we are still scratching our heads over this one. Somebody, somewhere, knows why this plywood patch is dropped in the middle of the hardwood floors...  It's only a foot square, and we have ideas of how to fix it, but it's sad.  At this point, we were losing daylight so we had to move into the bedrooms and see what lie there under those wicked awesome orange carpets...

WTF?

"This isn't as bad as it looks"... That's what we told ourselves too.  Some weird floral linoleum that looked like it was printed on a giant computer printer...the flower prints were all pixellated, we'd never seen anything like it before... The first bedroom was relatively straight forward, the lino came up in large chunks and required a minimal amount of scraping to get the glue off (6 hours worth).  It took me 4 days to scrape the lino off the other bedroom floor, it must have been a high-traffic room as the lino was pounded down right into the wood beneath it.  As you can see, it was well worth the effort because the hardwood continued from the living room right into both bedrooms (and the wannabe closet that separates them).  By the way...this stuff smelled just as bad as the carpet, but it was worse because we had to kneel in it for almost a week trying to remove the remnants.

With only one of the two bedrooms suitable for habitation during this days-long floor scraping
chore, the kids got the room and we were relegated to camping out on the living room floor surrounded by  boxes of unpacked stuff. The picture's cluttered, and there's some dude laying in the middle of the room... but you can see how nicely those floors cleaned up with just a good washing (and we had thought that we'd be moving in onto plywood floors after we lifted those carpets)...guess things could have been worse!