Flooring + Flooding = Frustration

Our big goal for this week was to finish the kitchen floor so that it will be ready for the cabinet installation next weekend. We also wanted to finish all the sanding with the big sander so that we could return it Monday. I’m definitely ready to be done with the sanding!


During the week we continued the floor work – Chris worked on the sub-floor and patches and I sanded most of the floor. On Friday, we were piecing in the boards in the master bedroom and started having some major problems. The walls in the room are square but the original flooring was not straight. When we were installing the new floorboards, the gaps between the new pieces started getting bigger and bigger. We decided to completely remove and re-install the floor at a later date – we’d much rather take the time to do it right than live with it as it is now. Besides, unfinished oak is much easier to sand than the fifty-year-old stuff!


Saturday, we continued with the sanding and replacing floor boards. Midday, Chris went to the basement and found some major flooding. Our gutters were removed a month and a half ago in preparation for the roof work. Apparently the rain we had over the weekend (on top of all the snow melt) was more than the ground could hold. So instead of finishing the floor work, we spent about an hour vacuuming up water. Chris was using the 16 gallon wet/dry vac and I was using the 4 gallon one – we both were emptying them every 30 seconds to 2 minutes. Over lunch we bought a good dehumidifier and fan. Fortunately, by Saturday night, the basement was dry. Below are a couple of the pictures that make it easy to see the water intrusion. The pictures I took of the deep water didn’t turn out very well.



My birthday, Sunday, we were able to make progress in the kitchen. We started by priming the walls and ceiling so that we won’t have to paint near the new cabinets. We continued the sanding in the other rooms to be able to return the big sander. In the evening we cleaned up all the debris and started staining the kitchen floor. The staining took more effort than we ever imagined. At first, the stain was too light. Then, we left the stain on the floor for too long. It was pretty slow going and we didn’t get back home until after 2:00 a.m. By the end, we were quite pleased with the way it looked and the couple bad spots will be covered with the cabinets.


In other news, we are starting to grow the seeds to start our garden. The window in my office gets a lot of sunlight which makes it the perfect place to grow plants. One of my co-workers started calling me “Farmer Kristy” and another one comes in four times a day to see the “garden.” We’re really looking forward to having a big garden this year – it’ll be much better than having a tiny concrete patio!

Under the Gun…

We are now definitely under the gun. We have found a couple to rent our condo starting in mid-April. We have been hoping to rent to someone we know – it takes the uncertainty out of finding a good renter online. An opportunity to rent to a co-worker’s son arose last week and we jumped at the chance. We met with the son and his girlfriend on Saturday and they have agreed to rent the condo for a year. Now, before they move in, we have to completely remodel both condo bathrooms, fix some odds and ends, and clean everything (including the carpet).

Our house move in date is now March 27. This means that in the next three weeks we need to have the floors finished, kitchen cabinets installed, appliances and countertops ordered, clean at least a few rooms, and pack everything at the condo. We have so much to do!

Our kitchen cabinets are complete and ready to be delivered but because the floors aren’t finished I had them hold the cabinets and they will be delivered on March 19. This gives us less than two weeks to patch, sand, stain, and polyurethane almost 2000 sq. ft. of floor – yikes! More on the floor later…

In order to help with the time crunch, my parents stopped by on their way back from vacation to pick up Tucker. He will stay with them until we move into the house – it will definitely help to have extra time that we would have spent on walks! Our bosses have also agreed to let us work compressed schedules for the next few weeks (either 4-10 hour days or 4-9 hour days with 4 hours on Friday). It will help to have that extra day or half day to get work done!

Now, for the work we completed this week – it was almost all floor related! Chris has been focusing on finishing up the patching of the floor. He finished the dining room, the foyer, and the hallway. Most of the patching has been very difficult with fitting new boards in between old boards. They always seem to shift during the repair process. He is doing a great job though!



On Thursday, Chris removed the bad floor boards in the master bedroom. There was a lot more to remove than we had expected. Some of the subfloor boards were bad and we had to remove those too. This is the last bit of patching we need to complete.



Saturday we arrived to find that the exhaust from the boiler fell apart again. The two elbows and connecting duct were laying on the floor and the exhaust was spewing noxious gasses into the house. Chris turned off the boiler and made the repairs on Sunday. Hopefully this summer we can replace this system.

I have been working mostly on preparing the floors for upcoming work. This included cutting out and laying tar paper, screwing down subfloor boards, applying wood filler to holes and installing plugs to cover screw heads.


This weekend we rented a couple sanders from ABC rental. One is a small radiator sander and the other is a large 4-head random orbital sander. I spent almost all of the weekend using the large sander. Last night I was able to sand under all of the radiators so that we could take back the sander early and save some money. I was able to completely finish sanding the den (36, 60, and 80 grit). Yesterday afternoon I started sanding in the dining room (with 20 grit) and was only able to remove the top layers of finish – fortunately the finish on this floor is much thicker than the others.

The Floor Work Continues...

We weren’t able to get over to the house much this week because of other commitments. We rented a thermal camera from a guy at work and took images of the house on Monday. Even though we just spent a lot of time and energy on installing insulation, there were still some spots that were not insulated as much as we would like. Thankfully, we will be able to correct the majority of the issues. Below are a few images we took during our inspection (in one of them you can see our reflection in a window).




The contractor finally installed the windows in the sunroom. It looks great but it still smells bad – the previous owner used to keep the dogs there. Hopefully we’ll be able to remove the odor when the weather warms up a bit.


We worked a lot over the weekend on the floors. We were able to complete the floor in the den and kitchen. We have a lot of spots of bad floor boards that need to be replaced before we can refinish the floors. This involves removing the boards, chiseling out some of the board ends, reinforcing the subfloor, laying tar paper, cutting new boards to fit properly in the spot, pounding them into place, and face nailing or screwing them down. This is an extremely tedious process and it will take us at least the rest of the week to finish. Below are some pictures of the bad floor boards and part of the process of removing/replacing them.

Forward Progress

This week started with a holiday. On President’s Day we removed the linen closet in the hallway. We are planning on moving the wall for the bathroom out about a foot and this requires the closet to be removed. It also needed to be removed to prepare for refinishing the hardwood floors.


This weekend we finally made some forward progress – installing new hardwood floor in the kitchen and den. It was also the longest time we’ve spent working on the house at one time – 33 hours from Friday night through Sunday night. Despite being extremely sore and tired, we’re very satisfied with the result.

In order to let the wood acclimate to the house we purchased half of the flooring on Wednesday night and the other half on Friday. Friday night we also started preparing the kitchen subfloor – vacuuming and laying down tar paper.




Saturday morning, after renting the manual floor nailer, we started removing some of the bad flooring in the dining room and all the flooring in the den. Most of the den floor was very badly stained – there were few boards that were worth saving.


Saturday afternoon and evening we started installing the new kitchen floor. The first few rows are the most time consuming because you have to make sure that they are square in the room and you have to face nail them (including recessing each one so that you can sand the area later). We found out quickly that red oak is an extremely hard, dense wood. There are quite a few bent nails in our trash today!

Once we had about 3 rows installed, the nailer was able to fit. Chris did all the nailing while I laid out the wood and cut the end piece of each row. At the end of Saturday evening we had about 1/3 of the kitchen floor complete.

Sunday morning we completed the floor in the kitchen (except for the rows we will need to face nail near the outside door – we’ll complete this later this week). In the afternoon, we prepared the den floor. This included screwing down the subfloor on each joist, vacuuming, and putting down tar paper. The rest of Sunday was spent installing the floor in the den.

We are so excited to finally have something to show for all our hard work. Our next big task is to sand all the floors – that could take awhile!

Our Aching Backs...

Due to more snow this week we were stuck inside. We were able to get over to the house on Tuesday morning to shovel out the driveway and walkway before the next big snowstorm arrived that afternoon. It took us five hours to shovel the 33 inches of snow.

It snowed another 14 inches from Tuesday afternoon through Wednesday. We got back over to the house on Friday afternoon to shovel out the additional snow. Below are some pictures of the snow and shoveling work.




Over the weekend, my parents were here to help. We removed the plywood on the kitchen floor to prepare it for installing new hardwood floor. Once it was down to the subfloor we had to re-secure the subfloor to the floor joists.


We are trying to get the house to the point where everything is prepared for the next big tasks we have. One of these tasks is to refinish the hardwood floors. To prepare for this we have removed all of the baseboards and shoe molding. There were also a lot of tacks and staples in the floor from when the bedrooms and stairs had carpeting. Each of these “prep” tasks sound easy and fast but it takes a surprising amount of time and effort to do this in the entire house.

The other big task we are preparing for is painting all the ceilings and walls. This will be the very last thing we do before moving in but we want to get all the dirty work done before we re-do the floors. Over the weekend we continued to apply drywall compound – we needed to add corner beading to the kitchen doorways, needed to straighten the ceiling joint upstairs, and needed to add more compound to the kitchen ceiling where we removed the bulkheads. Also adding drywall compound to all the nicks, holes, and dents in the walls is a job that never seems to be complete.

Cabin Fever!

We had a completely unproductive week at the house. The contractor didn’t show up all week and we didn’t have the opportunity to get to the house this weekend. One thing we did accomplish is to get the kitchen cabinets ordered, and they should be arriving mid-March.

Most of you reading this had similar weather to us this past weekend. For us, work closed before 1:00PM on Friday afternoon and the snow started falling shortly after. The snow finally stopped around 6:00PM Saturday evening. The final total snowfall was 33 inches. We probably spent about 5 hours shoveling snow – the hardest part was finding a spot to put all the snow after removing it from our cars, the sidewalk, stairs, and patio. We did have some fun early on Saturday by making a great snow fort – that’s the great part about being a big kid!

Several of the trees nearby are falling or losing branches from the weight of the snow. Our road still has not been plowed. We think it will be a couple more days before they get around to it and by that time we’ll have more snow from the next storm.

The biggest problem with the snow at the house is that we need it all to melt before the contractors can do more work. The next work they have to perform is putting on a new roof and gutters. We just hope that we’re able to get to the house before the week is out.

Below are some of our pictures of the blizzard of 2010.

This N’ That

This week, the contractors (very slowly) continued their work on the sunroom. The framing and supports are complete, but the windows and sliding door have yet to be installed. There was also some work completed on the exterior of the house. The gutters are removed in preparation for the new roof. They must have weighed a ton, because they hadn’t been cleaned out in years. The exterior painting was also done. The doors, trim, soffits, garage doors, and front porch ceiling all look much nicer than they did before. However, the roof will have to wait until the six inches of snow melts.

The most exciting event this week was the removal of the “mudroom” covering the back porch. In the beginning, we were only going to remove the small roof above the porch to make space for the painters. We used the reciprocating saw to cut through the roof, but it was a little sturdier than we expected. After an hour and two saw blades, we decided it would be easier just to remove the whole thing. So, we just kicked out the bottom, where it attached to the concrete, and threw it to the side. The reason why the saw could not easily cut through the roof was the six layers of shingles on top!



Over the weekend we started preparing the kitchen for the remodel. We moved the old appliances, cabinets and countertops downstairs. We removed the ceramic tile in the kitchen which was very tough. Under the ceramic are two layers of old tile. We don’t yet know if these are asbestos but we need to get someone to test them before we try to remove them.


The other work we did was to prepare for refinishing the floors and painting. This included removing all the molding and applying drywall compound to fix small holes in the walls.