Rehabber’s Rehab

When we got back from our rafting trip in Pennsylvania this Labor Day weekend, we returned to our half painted office and all disorganized house.

There seems to be a strange phenomenon in the house that as you work in the evenings, instead of cooling down the house gets hotter.  Maybe the stucco house releases heat stored up in the day as the evening goes on.  By the end of the evening I felt like I had spent an hour sweating it out at a bad spa and we finished putting up the paint on the walls of the office.  We painted the office “spinning wheel” by dutch boy, and decided not to change the color any (we were debating making it lighter), and are in retrospect both pretty happy with the results.  I’m leaving the trim white.

The office is not part of the great trim reclaiming project since if we do decide to add on a second story, this room is currently the top contender for where the stairs will go.  No point is doing a lot of work on it when it might all just be ripped out.  Plus it will be nice to have at least one room that is done.

Still to do: touch up the trim, paint the pink closet white and put up a curtain over the closet.

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…)