Our 2nd Week of Fixing Up: The Wood Floors

Our second week of work was sort of a change of plans. We had planned to paint in the kids' rooms, but decided to take a different route.

We knew the carpet would come out of the living room and we eventually wanted to put new carpet back in, but won't be able to afford it right away. After we removed the carpet, the floors in the hallway and dinning room ended up being about a half inch (or more) higher than the living room. Apparently, somewhere along the line, plywood had been put down and then a fake wood veneer floor over it. After the carpet was removed, the fake wood floor looked even faker. I wanted to take the fake stuff and plywood off to see what was underneath, but was unsure if we should even try, because it would be a lot of work and the floor under the plywood might not be worth much.

However, a big deciding factor to go ahead and do it was a terrible happening for our niece, Emily. My sister and her family came over to see how we were doing and, in her excitement, Emily tripped on the lip of the hallway flooring that stuck up above the living room floor and hit her head on the steps, cutting a deep gash in her cheek. You can read the story on my sister's blog.

So, Monday the 24th (after Peter's 2-month well-child check-up) we tore up the dinning room floor.

Tuesday the 25th, we spent tearing up the hallway (we had several set-backs, including a broken tool that Jason used to pull up the zillions of nails holding the plywood to the hardwood flooring).

Wednesday the 26th, we continued to prep the hardwood floors for sanding by filling in holes, replacing some termite damaged boards in the dinning room, putting in a new landing to replace the pet-urine damaged original, and creating a better cover for an old cold air return hole in the hallway.

Thursday, the 27th, we were finally able to sand.

Today, Friday the 28th, we were unable to do any work on the house because Jason had to be at work today.

Tomorrow, Saturday the 29th, we hope to stain and urethane the floors. We won't be able to do anymore work on it after tomorrow until the following weekend, Labor Day weekend (Sept. 5-7).

(I also got a bit of miscellaneous work done by cleaning in the kitchen and getting a start to putting contact paper on the cupboard shelves.)

Here are pictures of the nearly week-long process:

The Danish Festival!

This has nothing to do with fixing up our house, but I thought I'd include it because we celebrated our new town's annual "Danish Festival" on Saturday by attending the "Grand Dansk Parade".

My side of the family has made a sort of tradition of going to this parade starting with my oldest sister, who was in the parade as part of the marching band, followed by me when I was in band. Now that we are all older, we've begun to go to the parade as a sort of annual tradition/mini-family reunion for those who can attend.

Our 1st Week of Fixing Up: Misc. and Painting

We didn't do anything really significant to the house on August 20th due to a previously scheduled, minor, outpatient surgery for Jason. The third day of fixing, August 21st, we did a lot of miscellaneous jobs. Most notably, Jason re-wired some electrical, fixed some light fixtures (having to replace the one in the upstairs hallway because the bulb had broken off below the socket and we couldn't remove it), I sanded in Anna's room, and various other tasks that I didn't bother to get pictures of. The fourth day of fixing, August 21st, we also did misc. things and Jason got started on painting Anna's room.

Our 1st Week of Fixing Up: Wallpaper

The second day of our house fix-up, August 19th, we tore out the wallpaper in Anna's & Peter's rooms. This was a bigger and more time consuming job than I had thought it'd be.

Anna's Room:






Peter's Room: