After the cleaning spree of the past few days and with a friend coming into town this weekend, we are considering spending our first night in the house in the next couple of days. But first, we needed to set the furniture up, leading us on the first steps of layout and deciding how we want the rooms to look.
living room with couches and a bed thrown in
back bedroom with guest bed and room for side tables
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Last night was spent slaving over a bucket to clean up this:
Drywall dust from patching the plaster covers every surface
And hours later, I ended up with floors that look like this:
Living room after one mopping
I felt like I was completing a sisyphean task, with every moping merely spreading the dust about in slightly thinner and more even layers, and the living/dining room and back bedroom looking no better after each effort.
After that, tonight I was done. I mopped again, only be faced with the same slightly lighter thin film, add this onto my already bad mood, and I had had it. I retreated to the garage and my trim stripping and left the cleaning to the men. Like it should be.
An hour later, they had done a brilliant job cleaning, and i was in a calmer and more zen like state after methodically peeling paint. We took a dinner break to build an impromptu fire pit (not sure how legal that is…) and burned at least 6 inches off the wood lathe pile. Thor and Matt returned to clean up the supreme dirtiness of the kitchen and I got another board done. In the end, my mood was lifted and it turned out to be a good night.
Rehabbing as therapy.
Our most dramatic change to date has been the floors. In the first minutes of owning the house we immediately turned to ripping up the nasty carpeting from the sixties. What we uncovered was a mess or red oak floors. The previous owners had applied several different stains, from light gold to dark red. The floor had about a dozen places badly damaged areas. Our floor guy suspected the damage was caused by a overly competitive pets urinating around the house.
The fortunate thing about uncovering something disastrous in a remodeling is that if it can be fixed easily, it can have a dramatic impact and greatly improve the value of a home. Step in our floor guy, Jerry. Over our six day vacation, Jerry worked wonders, repairing the pet markings, filling in where we had taken out the living room-dining room divider, and refinishing all of the living space. (more…)
