Rehabber’s Rehab

With all the major construction done and the cabinets coming in a week it was time to get our kitchen floors refinished. Under two nasty layers of linoleum lay a roughed up maple floor. Only one person could renew those hardwood floors, our favorite contractor Jerry. Jerry had done great work on our living room floors and the urine damaged spots so we called on him again to rescue the kitchen floors.

Over two days Jerry painstakingly sanded, filled in, puttied and urethaned the kitchen and hallway floors. New replacement maple is a very bright nearly white color compared to the darker honey of old maple from ealier in the century. We had to fill in where the old pantry wall had left gaps in the floor. Jerry’s wood puttying and darkening of the new wood made it the entire floor look pretty similar unless you are looking for the differences. We also had three dark lines from water stains that ran perpendicular to the floor boards that Jerry was able to sand down to the faintest of markings. Any imperfections can be chalked up to the distinguished colorings of an original maple flooring. It looks really great with another buffing and coat of urethane to be done after the cabinets are installed.

Jerry also inspected the damage done by our electrician when they pushed around the couches scarring the living room and dining room floors. He suggested a buffing and extra coat of stain for no charge when he does the last kitchen coat would do the trick.

Jerry and our drywaller Francisco top the list of the professionals we’ve used while our electrician ranks lower because of the slow pace of work and his disregard for our project actually being somebody’s home when he throws furniture around and leaves messes lying around.

We passed our insulation inspection with flying colors and now have permission to cover up the walls with drywall. We originally planned to drywalling ourselves, but then looked into seeing if our mudder knew anybody. He came back with a price we couldn’t beat. So on Saturday morning Francisco and his buddy came by. A few short hours later the entire project was drywalled.

I’ve never seen anybody move so fast. These guys were actually running around the house while working. All we needed to do was finish a couple of framing things and try to keep them supplied with drywall.

On Sunday we took the day off after doing some cleaning and Francisco started mudding the walls to make them smooth. Mudding is an art that it just doesn’t pay to do yourself. You can never be as good as a professional. You can never be as fast, and its cheap work ($500). Unless there is a hole that needs to be patched you will never catch me mudding and sanding.

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By the end of the weekend the rooms had finally come together to look like actual living space. The bathroom had walls, the windows were surrounded by drwall, you could no longer see through to the outside, and a huge plus or plumber returned to install our new upstairs toilet.

With Liz finishing the painstaking cleaning of the slate tile we had a functional bathroom after five weeks of using the nasty and scary basement toilet.

By the middle of the week we could finally move back in, although we remained at Liz’s mom house because of the regular traveling for the holidays and the funeral in Galveston, TX.