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House Progress

Spring One Room Challenge Week Four: What Sheen of Paint Should I Use For…?

Week One | Week Two | Week Three

It’s week four of the One Room Challenge and I didn’t officially cross off one single item off the list. I’ve been working on trim painting all week (with a break over the weekend) because there is so much trim. I’m knee deep in paint, and honestly there’s no end in sight. The paint in this room is so much more detailed than just slapping a coat of paint on the wall and calling it a day. There will end up being three different colors (you’ve only seen one so far!) and three different sheens (you’ve seen two so far).

I figured this might be a good opportunity to chat about the three main sheens of paint I use throughout my home and for what purposes. Of course, rules are meant to be broken, but this is a general guiding principle and what I’ve found works best in my own house.

Flat Finish:

Honestly this is good for one thing and one thing only. Ceilings. You can see even in the terrible quality iphone photo above that the paint on the ceiling absorbs the light. It’s dark, but it won’t reflect light, which I guess is helpful for sleeping? I don’t know guys, I’m not an expert. It’s been said that flat paint can’t get wet, and that might be an outdated assumption as paint technology has improved over the years, but I’m still not taking any chances. I’ll leave it to the ceilings.

Semi-Gloss Finish

I use semi-gloss on all of my trim, painted doors and cabinets, and walls in my bathroom. (That last bit might be contentious in some circles, so don’t quote me on this, this is just what I find works for my house.) You can see in this picture that even though the ceiling and the trim are the same color, they reflect light completely differently. Semi-gloss is also much more wipeable, making it a good contender for trim. Have you cleaned the trim next to your doorknobs lately? That gets gross so quickly. Or maybe that’s just my house with toddler granola bar fingers running around. But I digress.

Eggshell Finish

Lastly, I use eggshell finish on almost all of my walls. It falls in between flat and semi-gloss, as it’s somewhat wipeable but it’s also a little more forgiving that flat. I’ll be painting the walls with eggshell finish, although I haven’t started yet, so there’s no visible example of it in this photo. But trust, eggshell is the way to go on *most* interior walls.

Like I said, rules are made to be broken, but this has worked for me. When I rolled up to Home Depot to get my paint order with very specific color and sheen requests, I know the employee was side eyeing me, but what can I say, I’ve painted a lot of rooms!

I probably have about two more weeks of painting ahead of me, as I have some more to finish on the trim (looking at you, windows), and then I’ve got the walls as well, but I can’t wait to see all of it come together. It’s getting so good! Be sure to head over to the One Room Challenge’s Blog page so you can see what everyone else has been up to this week. That’s it for today, have a fabulous day!

April 27, 2022 by
House Progress

Spring One Room Challenge Week Two: Old House Challenges

I can’t believe we are already onto the second week of the One Room Challenge! If you missed last week’s post with the design plan for the space, be sure to check it out here. I have been hard at work this week, feeling both frustrated and excited.

My first task was to float the walls along the upper section of the room with joint compound. This room has an “orange peel” texture that’s pretty common in homes here in the south, as well as in new construction. It’s not appropriate in a historic home, and I personally just don’t like the look of it, so I decided to smooth it out. It requires a large putty knife and lightweight joint compound, and it’s akin to frosting a large cake.

Once it’s applied I had to sand, which was a serious arm workout. It’s an underestimated task to be sure, but it’s not technically difficult.

Then came the head scratchingly difficult part. In typical old house style, the room is completely unlevel. The floor on one side of the room is two inches higher than the other side, making the entire wall slanted. I wanted to add beadboard to the lower portion of my wall, but it wasn’t as simple as measuring the height from the floor up and making straight cut across. I wanted to give the illusion of a straight line, so that meant each piece had to be cut at a slight angle. I don’t know if this is even making sense. It barely made sense to me. I purchased a laser level, and it was my saving grace for installing these beadboard panels at a straight-looking-but-not-actually-straight height.

For the first portion of the week, Ethan was out of town working, so I was attempting to figure out how to get everything installed correctly by myself. Needless to say, once he returned from his trip and was able to help me, things went a lot more smoothly.

We finished up the beadboard late last night, and although it’s not pretty progress, I do think it will be the most laborious and difficult part of the process, so I’m glad to have it checked off the list during the first week.

Next, I will need to fill nail holes and sand the beadboard to prep it for paint, then install the chair rail that will sit on top of the beadboard, and the picture rail that will sit higher up on the wall. Those will hopefully go much quicker than my beadboard install (and I really hope I don’t come back next week completely regretting these words)!

Now, I have to get back to work, but be sure to check out some other projects being completed this season over on the One Room Challenge Blog. There are some projects that I really can’t wait to see come to life! That’s it for today, friends. Have a fabulous day!

April 13, 2022 by
House Progress

We’re Moving the Master Upstairs… What??

YEP. You read that right. And if it seems totally random, that’s because it is. So I figured I owed it to you guys to walk you through my thought process and plans before I take you along for the ride.

So, flash back to about two weeks ago. We were driving home from being out of town for several days, and we were going to be arriving very late. While we were gone, it had gotten cold for the first time in the season, so we were anticipating walking in to a cold house because the furnace had not yet been turned on for the season. Our house is two floors, and has two separate thermostats and HVAC systems (one for each floor). Our son’s room is upstairs, directly above our current room. And for whatever reason, although he has been sleeping in his own room since he was about two months, I started to freak out and panic that having a separate system upstairs was terrifying because something could happen upstairs and we would have no idea downstairs because the HVAC systems are completely independent from each other. So, in the car that night, I started talking to Ethan about the possibility of moving our room upstairs (we have two additional rooms up there we aren’t really using), the pros and cons of the situation, and the timeline of when it could happen if we decided to do it.

We got home that night, and had pretty much decided we were going to move our room up there, it was just a matter of getting some work done. The room we are talking about is one of the untouched spaces in our house, which have been completely neglected since purchasing.

So, this week we started working! It’s been slow going because we have a one year old and can basically only work during naptime or at night. Not to mention the fact that whoever lived in this home before had some weird love affair with wall texturing compound, and sprayed? dabbed? rolled? (I don’t even know how this could have been installed) the spikiest, sharpest wall texture known to mankind. So we have the absolute pleasure of sanding and scraping every surface of the room before we can do anything else.

So, y’all want to see some before pictures?

Keep in mind, this isn’t going to be a glamorous before and after renovation. This room has six doors. SIX! Plus a half door to house the HVAC unit. Because of all the doors, there’s no logical space to put the bed. Also, this is going to be a very much phase one renovation. Meaning, we have larger plans down the line, but it’ll take a bit to get there.

So, let’s walk through the pros of using this room. Obviously, safety. Biggest benefit hands down. Also, with our current master being in the front of the house downstairs, our “Christmas Tree Window” is where our bed is. I’m most excited that if we can get our room situated upstairs, we will have a tree visible from the street outside. Another benefit will be the proximity to the third bedroom (the one we will use as a nursery for our next child someday). The new nursery will open right into the master, which will be super helpful for those first months. (Phase Two renovation will eventually separate those rooms with a hallway and an additional staircase, but that will come later on.) Right now, we don’t have a closet in our room. Our room was the original parlor to the house, but was turned into a bedroom when the addition was made in the 1950’s. We have been using the downstairs coat closet as our main closet for a year. Which has been fine, but I can almost guarantee that a neighbor at some point has seen me run pantless through the living room to the hall closet to get dressed in the morning. The upstairs room has two closets!!!

The cons: need I say again..SIX DOORS. It’s an awkward layout for sure. It has a door the a lower level roof for goodness sake. I have some design plans to work with it for now, so we’ll see how that turns out. Also…the dungeon bathroom. It has graced my Instagram stories mayyyybe twice. Our upstairs bathroom is a scary place. And it’s low on the list of priorities. To be honest, I’m pretty scared to use it. So I’ll be using the bathroom downstairs still. Which I’m sure will be annoying in the night. Or on those cold mornings getting ready for work.

So, at the risk of getting too wordy already, let’s talk about the plan for the space. Y’all want to see my super sophisticated moodboard that I literally made on my lunch break? Well, you’re in luck:

When we bought the house, we bought ten gallons of the same white paint color and just went to town with it in every room. We don’t have any more of that paint, so I will have to buy more regardless. I’m really inspired by dark, saturated blues and greens right now, so I’m thinking something like this. None of the things in this photo are exact things I plan on purchasing (except the headboard, which is what we already have), but are more or less ideas for the space. I will likely thrift a lot of items, or try to source some on FB Marketplace. I plan on stripping some of the painted over doors, with a bright, crisp, white trim. Moody and dark, with brass accents. And don’t even get me started on a timeline, because who knows when it will be finished. But, I do plan on priming it and moving us up there this weekend. Everything else can be done after we are sleeping in the room.

So anyway, that’s the plan. I’ll keep you along for the ride! That’s all for today friends. Have a fabulous day!

October 29, 2019 by
DIY Projects

Six Big Impact Projects With One Gallon of Paint

Hello, friends! I thought it would be fun today to show you a few things around the house that are seemingly random but all have one major thing in common.

So, everybody knows about the power of paint in transforming a space, yada yada yada. You hear diy lovers everywhere talk about it. Well, that’s because it’s true. Paint can make something totally blah look totally fabulous.

So, let’s back up a little bit. A few weeks after our son was born, I decided to paint the stairs in our house. As one does mere weeks after giving birth. Obviously. So, I went to Home Depot (this is not sponsored by the way, I just only shop there), and picked up a gallon of Behr’s Totally Black in a latex semi-gloss finish. I wasn’t sure how much I would use, or if one gallon would be enough, but I decided to stick with one and if I needed more, I would go get more.

So, the black staircase was born. This is the view from the front door, by the way. I was pleasantly surprised at how well the paint covered the stairs (I did two coats), and how little paint I had actually used. So then, while still on maternity leave, I decided to paint the fireplace. Because, well, I already had some paint I could use, so why not? Hence, the black fireplace joined the party.

Now, in this picture, you may notice a sneak peek of another project. Hold on, I’ll get to that. Seeing that I still had some leftover paint in the bucket, I decided to go ahead and paint my back door. Now, this one comes with a warning. The back door is in the kitchen which is completely unrenovated and honestly just ugly. The quality of this photo is terrible. I’m sharing just to show you yet another thing I did with this single bucket of paint. So here we go.

The door is awful. It was more awful before. That’s pretty much all I have to say about that. Moving on.

Some months later, the paint can had found a home in the garage awaiting some eventual use. That use came when on a random day in which work was unexpectedly cancelled (I work in a school, and the water had been turned off due to some road construction so school was cancelled). Finding myself with some extra free time, I decided to build a coffee table. A perfectly stable and precise coffee table it is not, but I built it alone and with items I had completely in my garage spending zero dollars. I’m sure you can guess where this is going…I painted the legs to the coffee table with more of the black paint.

Time goes on. On a whim one day browsing Pinterest, I decide to paint some faux-dalmation wallpaper on a passthrough area between my living room and dining room. Good golly this one was a good one. In a few hours time with the trusty bucket of black paint and a step ladder, I had done this.

The dalmatian wall is my faaaaaaavorite. It adds so much personality to the space and I love it. It was one of the most popular projects I have ever posted about on Instagram as well. And why not? At this point, it wasn’t costing me any more money and wowza it packs a punch.

So that brings us around to the final project, the one that you’ve now possibly spotted twice already in these photos. You guessed it. The dining room chairs. By this time, I’ve already completed five other projects with this gallon of paint, but I still have more so why not? I did use a paint sprayer with these chairs, which means I had to add water to my mixture to make it thin enough for my sprayer. So, full disclosure, I stretched a bit here.

This is the most recent project, and they aren’t completely finished yet. I’m looking for the right fabric to recover the chairs, but I haven’t found what I’m looking for at the right price point just yet.

So there you have it. Six things I did with one silly gallon of paint that cost me less than $30. Insane, right? Would you believe I still have some left? Yep. Now, I probably won’t do any new projects with it, as I’d like to have some left just for touch ups. And with all these things, it’s likely I’ll have things to touch up over time.

So, a couple of takeaways here. Number one: paint is freaking awesome. You can cover a lot of ground for a little money. Number two: doing these different projects in different spaces throughout the house makes things feel more cohesive. The fireplace is the same color as the front stairs which makes it feel less random and more like they belong together even though they are in completely different spaces. It helps the house flow visually, I think. All that to say; I hope this inspires you. Get out there and paint something!

That’s all for today, friends. Have a fabulous day!

October 14, 2019 by
DIY Projects, House Progress

House Progress – Our Front Stairs

Hi guys! Today I wanted to share a quick update on a section of our house that isn’t finished yet, but looks waaaaayyyyyy better than it did before, and I’m happy to live with it as-is for a while.

Our front staircase is one of the original features from 1895. It is tight, narrow, and has a very abrupt turn which makes moving furniture upstairs quite tricky. Just as a reminder, this is what it looked like when we moved in:

Looking at that photo is absolutely crazy to me because it looks nothing like this anymore! Within the first few days, we pulled out the carpet, and a few weeks later while we were working daily, we painted the walls. But for a couple months, we hadn’t done anything with the stairs themselves. And then our son was born, and we were a little slow to getting things done, so it took a while before I got around to painting.

I decided to paint the stairs, back in December, I believe, but I never really shared the full details. 

And now they’re black and white and I’m totally in love! They make the space feel so much bigger and brighter, even though it really is a tiny staircase.

Pardon the glaringly bright sun, I was just too excited to wait to take these pictures!

The color is Behr’s Totally Black, with Ultra Pure White (the color you get without any mixing – straight from the can) trim, and Polar Bear on the walls. We painted the staircase with a semigloss finish, which I would not normally recommend on a high traffic area, but we do plan on adding a runner down the stairs for comfort, so they will not be getting much foot traffic at all once the runner is installed.

Here you can see an unedited look (nope, I didn’t clean up for y’all) at the stairway into the rest of the house. So aside from the runner, we do plan on doing a few other things. The light fixture will be changed, of course, but we’re also thinking about a fun statement tile to replace the parquet flooring. For now though, it’s a small makeover to tide us over until we get to the real thing!

So, if you can pardon my photography skills, that’s the latest little update. Projects are going pretty slowly around here, but as soon as we get back at it, I’ll keep y’all updated. 🙂

That’s all for today, friends. Have a fabulous day!

 

March 18, 2019 by
DIY Projects, House Progress

Status Update: End of 2018

Hi friends! I’m so glad you’re here! If you’ve been following along on our house progress on Instagram then you probably have seen lots of little projects we’ve been working on as we’ve been doing them. These days, it’s a bit easier for me to do a quick update there than on here, just because life with a newborn is busy! In case you haven’t been following along, here’s the deal with this post. My  Status Updates (Check out the first one here or the second one here) are a series of unedited, real life photos rounding up the entire process of what we’ve accomplished thus far.

At the time of my last update, we had not yet moved into the house. We have since moved, had a baby, and continued working. To say things are a bit crazy would be an understatement. We are definitely still in “fixer upper mode,” when looking at any room in the house, there are at least five undone projects that come to mind. So, bearing all of that in mind, let’s have a look at what our house looks like right now.

The Foyer 

We lived with completely undone stairs for a little while before I went ahead and painted the stairs. This is the view from our front door, and it’s a very tight space. Painting the stairs and the walls made it look a little bit more open though. Still to do in this space: replace the light fixture, add trim along the ceiling going up the stairs, add a runner up the stairs, do something about the floors (we aren’t sure what the plan is…there are no original hardwoods, so we might lay a statement tile. We are still in the very early planning stages on that particular project), and lay a transition piece between this an the living room floor.

The Living Room

This room is mostly “done” with the exception of the transitions on the floor from one section to the next, and replacing the light fixture (we haven’t done that in any area of the house yet). If you look closely in the first picture, you can see a thin cable running along the floor. It’s something for the internet that needs to be run underneath the house. I also want to replace 99% of the furniture here, but that’s not necessarily considered a project.

The Dining Room

The dining room is the most embarrassing in its current state. It took me a month to clear the moving boxes from here, we had no table for two months, and Ethan still has a makeshift desk sitting in the corner (the room that will be the office upstairs is completely undone). We don’t have chairs or any other dining room furniture, but it’ll get there. The fireplace has been painted, and everything else is complete, with the exception of caulking along the ceiling trim.

The Bedroom

Our room has a ways to go, but since our son is still sleeping in here in the bassinet (not pictured), everything is temporarily out of place. The rocker will eventually go back into the nursery once he starts sleeping through the night, and once the extra furniture is out of there, I’ll feel more inspired to decorate and finish things in here. We need to add some trim pieces in here, and add a light fixture. This room doesn’t have an overhead fixture at all, so it’ll be a bit more labor intensive than fixtures in the other rooms.

The Bathroom 

The bathroom is small and hard to photograph, but the only thing completed in here is the cabinetry has been painted this emerald green color. As you can see, we need to replace the light switch box, which we will do in the entire house all at once. We replaced the outlets, but we haven’t done the light switches yet.

The Nursery 

I did a whole post about our son’s room, because it’s the only room that’s “done.” It actually still needs a new light fixture and light switch box, but other than that it is done. If you missed that post, you can check out more photos of it here.

We haven’t done anything else on the outside just yet, but we do have some major plans for that yellow house. (Hint – it won’t be yellow forever). We’re at a point now where we have to slowly plan things out. In part, because we spent all the money we had earmarked for house projects when we bought the house, but also because things move at a much slower pace with a newborn around. When I was 8 months pregnant, I was working 12 hour days in the house, and people thought that was crazy. It may have been, but now I can only work in one or two hour increments during naptime. So, in 2019, we’ll be moving a bit slower. Anywho, that’s the update for today. This house has come a looooooong way since our closing date, but she still has a long way to go before she is everything we envision. That’s all for today, friends. Have a fabulous day!

December 27, 2018 by
House Progress

Status Update – One Month In

Hi guys! So glad you’re here! I have been so busy just about every day I haven’t had a chance to sit here and tell you all how things are going at the house. It has been just about a month since we closed on the house, and in that time, school has started back up for me, so my schedule looks something like this: go to school (work), come home and eat a quick dinner, head to the house to work on projects, and then come home late just in time to quickly shower and collapse into bed. On the weekends, Ethan’s family has been helping us, and we are putting in twelve hour work days each weekend. Oh, and I am now what one would consider…. very pregnant. So, things are pretty crazy around here. We originally planned on moving in at the end of August despite the progress we were at, but we extended our lease on our rental for another month, so if all goes according to plan, we’ll be moving at the end of this month. And we’re really hoping things do go according plan, because my due date is looming closer and closer!

 

So, without further ado, let me show you all the things we’ve been working on! If you didn’t see the before pictures or our first status update, you may want to see those first. And, please remember, these photos are all iPhone photos taken mid-project and therefore not staged at all! There is some serious mess happening here.

So let me show you room by room. These projects are not necessarily in any order of completion, just by room.

 

Exterior 

Outside, we have powerwashed the front and side (the other side is covered in paint supplies and power tools and an old water heater so we haven’t powerwashed it yet). Basically powerwashing is my new favorite thing. We also did some major tree trimming, pulling out of weeds, hedge trimming, weed eating, edging, and mowing. The lot is pretty large and has a lot of trees, so this was a lot of work.

She looks a bit better from the front, now that the grass isn’t a foot tall, and tree branches aren’t blocking the view from the street. 🙂

I also took some hemp oil to the front door which was super dry and tired-looking. It was a super quick project (literally 20 minutes) that made a huge difference! Here’s the before:

And the after!

Again, no staged professional photos here. 🙂

The Front Bedroom 

As you know, one of the main projects was closing in the archway off the bedroom onto the weird carpeted porch. We (and by we, I mean Ethan, his dad, and brother) opened the wall, straightened the archway, added french doors. This room has been primed and ready for paint as well.

On the outside of the doors, the guys added a completely new porch. The existing sun porch was about six inches higher than the floor in the bedroom, and was just rotten plywood under the carpet. Gross, I know. The tore the entire thing out, put in new support beams on the ground, lowered the floor to the same height at the bedroom floor, and laid new deck boards.

Right now, it’s covered in excess materials from in the house, but you get the idea of what it will look like once it’s all cleaned, painted, the door has hardware, and cute rocking chairs on it.

This is the side of the house, and directly off the master bedroom, so I’m super excited about this spot.

The Living Room 

In the living room, the sub floor has been completely removed, the walls have been sheetrocked, and the ceilings have been painstakingly smoothed out after tearing down all the wallpaper.

The trim that belongs in this room has been de-nailed (which took forever), powerwashed (it smelled like cats still), primed, and painted in the garage. Once the floors are done and the walls are textured and painted, the trim will all be put back in place.

The Foyer 

The foyer was upholstered, so we took all of that down, and took what was probably 1,000 staples out of the shiplap. The shiplap has been sanded and primed, ready for paint. This is the only shiplap in the house that we will be leaving exposed. We also primed some of the the trim in this room as well. There is more painting to be done on the stairs (not all of it, don’t worry), but some of the stair treads need to be repaired first.

The Dining Room

This room has been exhaustingly spackled, the drywall repaired (by my mother-in-law and myself, I might add), textured, and primed. The ceiling has also been smoothed after the insane amount of wallpaper residue that was left. It is ready for paint! 🙂

The Kitchen 

In this room, we’ve primed the walls, ceiling, and trim. There were also some cracks that had to be repaired beforehand.

We are also eventually going to build out a portion of this room into a mudroom, so we are relocating all the plumbing (washer, dryer, and hot water heater) into the corner of the kitchen. This has been a huge ordeal for my father-in-law, Ethan, and his brothers. It involves a ton of crawling under the house to move plumbing hoses, and lots of things that I don’t fully understand. We are moving the washroom basically across the entire house, which has been a job. But, it has given me what is my favorite picture of Ethan ever taken.

There are still some finishing touches to be done before we can officially check this off the list, but this is where the eventual laundry room will go.

Also… a sneak peek at another project I’ve worked on! If you follow me on Instagram, you may have watched my stories documenting this project. I’m not ready to talk about it yet….because I’m still a little bitter and it may go down in history as a massive fail. I will keep you guys updated in a separate post on the outcome!

The First Floor Bathroom 

This room may just have a lighbulb dangling from the fixture hookup, but it has been primed and painted! Since it it the smallest room we will be painting, we did some experimenting with the paint color over the primer to test the coverage. So this is the only room that has actual paint! Exciting times, friends, exciting times! (It does need some touch ups, but let’s not talk about that.)

 

I don’t have a picture, but we’ve also prepped the upstairs nursery by sanding the spikey textured walls, filled in a ton of holes, and primed it for paint. Lots more to do, my friends, but so much has been done. It’s crazy to look at the progress we’ve made so far, but also I’m constantly freaking out about finishing in time. It’s a roller coaster of emotions! Everything takes so much longer than you think it will, and things are constantly coming up that we didn’t anticipate. Still though, this is one of the most exciting times for us. We can’t wait to move in!

I’ll keep you guys posted over the next few weeks about what we’re up to next. That’s all for today, friends. Have a fabulous day!

September 3, 2018 by
House Progress

Status Update: The First Weekend

Hey y’all! Thanks for stopping by! I’m starting a new series called “Status Update” today. The point of this series is going to be to recap the small things we’ve accomplished over a period of time. This isn’t going to be one tutorial or reveal, it’s not going to be for decorated rooms, it’s just going to be a gauge of progress on the house, and all the random things we’ve worked on.

If you haven’t seen the before pictures, you may want to start here because it has come a long way already. This was our first weekend in the house, so all of what we’ve done so far has been accomplished within a few days. We’re anxiously trying to get things done, as we’re under pretty tight time constraints (we plan to move in at the end of the month, so there are several projects that need to be done ASAP).

We closed on the house on Tuesday, and got to work on Wednesday. We started in the living room, which looked like this:

The carpets were infested with the smell of cat urine (#nevergettingacat). We rolled them up and got them out, which was a sweaty and incredibly stinky task.

We then started pulling down the upholstery on the walls, which also smelled of cat urine. It was stapled to the wall behind the trim and baseboards, so we ended up having to remove all the trim. By the end of Friday night, we had all the wall upholstery down, and pulled out the staples in the wall, which wasn’t easy.

Saturday we got up bright and early ready for a long work day. Ethan wanted to start with some plumbing issues, so while he replaced a pipe on the exterior of the house and a piece on the inside of the toilet, I started tearing down the textured wallpaper on the ceiling of the dining room.

The wallpaper on the ceiling in the living room and dining room both needed to come down, but it was so difficult. It actually still isn’t 100% done. We tried several different methods, including water and vinegar with a scraper, scoring the ceiling with a knife and pulling it off dry, and sanding it off with a sander. Eventually, we ended up getting a heavy duty wallpaper remover, applied it with a pesticide sprayer, and peeling it off. It was time consuming and took the majority of the day with one or both of us working on it.

(This was taken after about 12 hours of working on the house. Which explains the look of death on our faces. 🙂 )

Sunday morning we arrived to this, which is all the paper we had scraped from the ceiling. We cleaned it and turned our attention to the floor. So far we had removed the carpet and carpet pad, and planned to scrape the linoleum. The original parts of the house have the original hardwood beneath them, so we assumed they were beneath the linoleum. We (and by we, I mean Ethan. This was all him.) started scraping, but we couldn’t tell what the condition of the wood was because there was so much glue on it. I took a hand sander to it just to test it out, and we realized it was just a large sheet of plywood under the linoleum. Subfloor.

We were super bummed because we really wanted hardwood, and we didn’t have it. We made a plan to put in carpet until we could afford traditional hardwoods at a later date. I started researching wall to wall carpeting, and we planned on scrubbing the floor and painting a layer of Kilz over the linoleum to mask any remaining odor before having carpet installed. I did not like this plan, but I knew it was one of those things we were going to have to compromise on in the short term.

So we are prepping the floor to start painting, and Ethan sees along the edge where we removed the baseboards something that he thinks might be hardwood under the subfloor. So then this happens: 

So before we know it, we’re pulling up the plywood to find the original hardwood underneath. Praise the Lord. In modern homebuilding, a plywood subfloor goes below where you would lay hardwoods. But, this house has had 123 years of different owners and different repairs and additions made, so there’s no telling who did what and when they did it. Ethan kept asking me when I was going to stop asking questions…because when it comes to this house, nothing makes sense! Our current plan is to refinish the hardwood in this room, as well as the other rooms that have the same wood.

So this is where we ended the weekend. The plywood came up without too much difficulty, but Ethan is going out of town for work this week, so we had to call it quits early. Overall, we did a lot more destruction than construction, which makes you feel like you haven’t really done anything but make a mess. Overall though, we got a lot done. Now we just have to start putting it back together. No pressure.

Next weekend Ethan’s family will be in town to help with some projects, so we’re hoping to knock out a few things. We’re currently in a race to get things moving so we can get this place as livable as possible before we have to move in. There is so much to do, but I am optimistic that we will be able to get done the top priority things. Everything else can be done after we move in, and we will be working on this house for the next few years, but for now, we’ve got our work cut out for us. Stay tuned for the next status update. That’s all for today, friends. Have a fabulous day!

August 5, 2018 by