The First Wave...

Within 30 minutes of closing, we passed the point of no return. In the first pass through the house as owners, we pulled up a good share of the adhesive carpet tiles, tore down the old curtains, and tossed the accumulated garbage--aaah, but it did not end there. Removing the adhesive of the carpet tiles also damaged some of the underlying hardwood floor. We noticed that the stove was way too accessible to little hands, so we hatched plans to re-organize the kitchen cabinets a bit, and of course, made monstrous plans to change the color scheme (baseboards were a "Chivesdale Gray morning"--no kidding--we think someone had to be clinically depressed!

Since that morning, our vision for the house has...well, evolved.

Regarding the kitchen...what started as simply moving around some of the cabinets (most of which were only half installed anyway), to removing all cabinets and replacing the countertop, to putting new vinyl on the floor, to replacing the currently functional but not "what we really want" cabinets to something we will be happy with for years to come...in all, the kitchen is/will be pretty much totally revamped--but we wont have to do anything but cook in it for a long long time (we hope). Yes, we are stripping paint off of the woodwork...only 3 layers...but man, those windows are BIG.



The living room and dining room will change colors, but no major changes are planned until post-move in.



The upstairs is where much of the action has taken place in the last few weeks. Since the finish and some of the boards were damaged when the carpet was removed, we decided to take the floors back to their "native state"...sanding and new coats of polyurethane throughout the second floor. This includes the sunroom, which had a beautiful tone of gray porchpaint over a nice wood floor (courtesy of the last owners).




Of course, diving into such things is never as easy as it sounds. Before sanding/finishing the floors I decided that I should probably clean out as many cracks as I could. Evidently the baseboard/floor junction has accumulated dirt, dust, and other things since...well...they were first installed. As you can see, it was productive--in a few ways. About 14 cents, half a dozen buttons, 157 hairpins, and a Springfield Transit Authority bus token later, all of the cracks were emptied out. The earliest penny was 1937, the earliest dime was 1949. Some of you may be cringing, but it was actually very interesting--kind of like digging a site--complete with stratigraphy and dirt!




After "cleaning" came the sanding. I was actually pretty surprised at how easy it was. We rented one of those new-fangled orbital floor sanders from the hardware store. Pretty difficult to get it into the pickup, then up to the second floor, but once there...we were off like a flash. Started out with a 20 grit sandpaper--and I have to admit, I've seen gravel roads that were a finer grit than that. But it worked. It pulled off the remaining varnish pretty well and even removed some of the nastier splinters. 60 grit next, and then 80. We ended it there...things looked good, we were running out of time, and I was losing feeling in my extremities from running that monstrous machine 12 hours a day (what did I do over my Christmas Vacation?). The floor underneath isn't perfect, but aaahhh, it's a nice hardwood floor. We're not really sure what kind of wood it is...but we're thinking it's ash. It's definitely a hardwood. The grain pattern isn't oak, and the colors have a wide range--from blonde to darker brown. Whatever it is, we like it.





When we finished sanding, it was time to figure out how to finish. We could have put down a stain--but frankly--we liked the look of the wood, so we just decided to go straight to polyurethane. I was really surprised after the first coat, it looked great! It looked so good in fact that Stacey suggested that we redo the first floor too! (not going to happen before we move in) Last night I put down the 4th and last coat. I still think they look pretty good--but then the main goal of refinishing the floors was to cut down on the number of splinters. After the first coat of poly there were a number of splits that had to be glued down--another night of me and the super glue (the discs in the picture mark every place that I had to glue a splinter down). Yes, there are still places where it's pretty rough--particularly where the carpet was extra sticky. At some point--if we think that we want a "perfect" floor, we'll have to replace those boards, but for now--aaaaahhh...it's nice.




Of course, we couldn't simply ignore the rest of the house while finishing the floors and ripping out the kitchen. In the meantime we also got a coat of primer on the dining room and finally excised the last of the "wine" theme. Oh yeah, and guess where the kitchen cabinets went to after we ripped them out the kitchen.




The kitchen is--as we say--back to zero. There is vinyl and appliances (even a new refrigerator!)...but no cabinets. This picture shows where things will go eventually...

We bought a house! (Aaaack!)

Ok, so I'll give this a spin. The purpose of this blog is to give all of those interested an update on the goings on around our house. So, after a decade of graduate school and graduate school living (mac n' cheese and cheap rat-trap rental homes), we've finally arrived in a place where we'll stay for awhile. We've slowly tired of fixing our landlords' mistakes through the year, and would like a place that we can make our own--customize a bit to our own liking--and finally break out the good china (so to speak), so we bought a house. The county assessor claims the behemouth was built in 1915. It's a 3-bedroom, 1 bathroom, 2-car garage, old-school, big-ass, house. More than likely, it was one of those "kit" houses that were popular around that time...but that would a story for later.

We're the 4th owners. We don't know much about the first owners. The second owners moved in in the 1950s, proceeded to paint much of the first floor in the classy colors of the time (bright yellow LEAD paint). The 3rd owners moved in 50 years later, in 2003 and made many "improvements"--most of which we are trying to undo (are we the only ones who think that adhesive carpet tiles are tacky?).

Despite being happy home owners for over a month now...we still haven't moved in...but wait, there are reasons. First, we have a lease (booo) that we probably ought to at least come close to fulfilling. Second, bringing the house "back to zero" is taking a little longer than we had expected. We figured it would be nice to get the BIG projects out of the way before we clutter up the place with our stuff...and if we had moved right in and didn't need to do those things...well, this blog probably wouldn't exist. So without further ado...here are a few photos of the house--before we started--ground zero so to speak.