Laying our own floors: Prepping

Once we picked the floors, we had to wait a few weeks until Andy would be home. He decided he wanted to do the floors on a day I worked since I wouldn't be of much help in the actual laying process. We picked a weekend I worked on a Saturday so that we could do the prep on Friday. Earlier in the week we went and picked up the floors and brought them home so that the wood could adjust to the temperature and moisture level in the house. So our front hall looked like this:

 

On Friday we took to prepping the floors, which was surprisingly easy. Andy took all the baseboards off in the front room and down the hall, he said this was kind of a pain because of the way the installers had nailed it but it went quick. Here's a picture of the floors without baseboards:

Once the baseboards were off it was time to roll the carpet and padding up and cart it away:

That was really easy, very heavy, but easy. Especially since there are still construction dumpsters on our street. Shh, don't tell. Voila, no carpet:

Now the next part was probably the most difficult, we had to take all the carpet strips that held the carpet in place out and also pull up any staples or nails in the sub floor. It was more tedious than hard and took the most time. I pulled the staples while Andy removed the transitions. Once all that was done we had to sweep up all the debris, which was not that pleasant, I found some things under the padding I'm not pleased about, like dead insects and some dirt clods from the construction aspect. The very last thing that had to be done was sanding the floor and priming it so our naughty kitty couldn't find the spot she had peed.

Sorry for the blurry picture, I was tired by this point.

We used Kilz 2 on the floor, which we had read would cover the area where the cat missed her litter box and keep her from smelling it. That had to dry for a few hours and at this point it was around 9:30 so we decided to give it up for the night and Andy would continue on in the morning.

Andy will be posting about the next steps because he was the one doing them, so it may be a few days before that post goes up.

 

Posted with Blogsy

A Demo

We have only been living in the house a couple months but we have already found an area to demo. Right off of the garage there is an area our builder calls an e-zone. Basically, it's a small desk area and in the model it seems like a great idea. In reality it's really just turned into a dumping ground. Take a look:

Yep, it's not pretty. It's a cluttered mess and I can't stand it. So we decided we are going to rip it out and replace it with a mini-mud room area. Allow me to show you our inspiration:

Anna White's Smiling Mud Room

House of Smith's entry-way

Small mud room- found on Ana White

These are the three inspirations we are working with to come up with our design. Let me share what we love about each one. From the top, Ana White's smiling mud room is lovely, very bright and open. What I loved most about this design was the curved dividers and openness which we need because there are light switches and sockets in the way. From the House of Smith design I really loved the mail slot idea with the metal boxes and the bead board, plus they took a space they hardly used and turned it into something useful which is the same plan we have. From the last design I just love how they utilized the small space. As you can see the space we are working isn't very big and I wanted to make sure that we utilize every inch.  Before we start we have to know what we are doing and Andy also need to wrap up work on the media console before we can start on another project. I have been working on a design right now, trying to measure and draw out (rather poorly) what we want. Hopefully, I can share something with you in a few days just as long as you promise not to laugh at my ridiculously poor drawing skills.

Poof, I'm back!

I apologize for taking the blog off the public sector for a little while, we were dealing with some legal stuff with our old rental company and didn't want anything to come up. I don't want to get into it too much but we decided not to pursue it anymore as it's not really worth our time and energy. We would like to focus that energy on making our new home kick ass.

I will be honest there wasn't really much to post about while we were offline. We kind of took a bit of a break from all things house after the party. We were in hyper drive for a few weeks so I think we needed a break. However, now we are starting to get rolling on some stuff and I'm excited to share it with you. Just a little preview of the plans in the works:

• A demo will be taking place in the near future
• A journey into the land of grout and tile
• More painting
• Some awesome hand-drawn designing
• An adventure in re-covering

Plus I should probably share some pictures of the house since we painted and furnished it. All this and more to come in coming days/weeks!