More Windows, Trim, Walls, and Pennies

We have continued to work diligently on various projects around the house as we are able. Sometimes I feel as though we are a bunch of snails crawling all over these projects! A lot of times the long hours spent on things is because we are figuring out what we are doing (after extensive research) and just have no idea how much to order of things. Take, for example, our wonderful living room wood floor renovation project. We saw a nice video about how to fill the cracks (yep, after we stained and put on the polyurethane, we learn about this - nice timing, right?) So, we ordered six tubes of wood filler thinking that would be enough to finish the living room floor. Not! As you can see from this picture, we filled approximately one-third of the entire floor.

All those really light colored lines are cracks that have been filled. The plan is that I buy a quart of that wood fill putty stuff and literally scrape it into every crook, crack, and cranny using a putty knife. Once it dries, you mop the excess stuff right up. (Note to self....do this step before you stain and seal next time!) I am now trying to find the right stuff in quarts or gallons. It is not as easy as you think. Additionally, the video we saw had this guy rubbing it on with his fingertip to ensure that each crack was completely and smoothly filled. He's nuts. By the second tube, I figured out how to use the putty knife. Way faster and much better for the said fingertip, especially when the cracks are as wide as some of ours unfortunately are.

Remember the wonderful bathroom penny floor project? This is the first picture I showed you with about $14.00 worth of pennies.

Here is another picture with an additional $25.00 worth of pennies, for a total approximately $39.00 and some change. I mean, we do find odd pennies here and there around the house and friends and family members have been donating some to the project as well. We just keep track of what we get from the bank.

As you can see, $25.00 in pennies can cover quite a bit of square footage. My family (read my children) were really pushing for us to put in some kind of design. We debated all sorts of things from the Green Bay Packers logo to a music symbol like the treble clef or just our initial. I opted for our initial. The kids thought it was funny because the "F" could stand for "fart." As you can see, our humor is still in tact, even with all this wonderful remodeling. This is what the floor looks like with about $64.00 worth of pennies.

And I have also been playing with my new miter saw and wood. We had a lot of weird things going on with our wood floors. Everything from pieces being cut out to install funny angled walls, to the original staircase being reconfigured (to our best guess) and repairing the floor with cheap sub-floor materials. We wanted to keep the wood floors as original as possible, but where to scavenge the wood? We opted for the side entryway. Some of the original flooring had rotted over the years and while most of the boards were in good shape, it was not the best place for a wood floor. We decided to pry up all that wood as part of our side hallway project (more on that in a bit).

This is our side hallway. As you can see, it is fairly long and narrow, with stairs that lead to the landing. Additional stairs (not visible) lead to the basement. This area gets a lot of traffic so working on it gets kind of chaotic. The other challenge is that our house has really no storage space, as in coat closets, on the main floor, unless you consider the built-ins in the formal dining room. I have some ideas on how to tackle that based on some other blogs I love to read and use for inspiration. But more on that another day.

Here is another view from the end of the hallway looking towards the door. As you can see, the landing is not all that big so we have decided to tile it. I found some beautiful coppery glass tiles that I plan on using. This will make it easier to clean up and protect the wood underneath. But first, we had to pry up all the original hardwood flooring.

My wonderful husband figured out the best way to get the boards out with the least amount of damage. We still had to remove a lot of nails, but since I was cutting each board to fit, we were able to eliminate anything too damaged or rotted. Then the fun really began. It was a lot like completing some strange jigsaw puzzle - but with a miter saw. I had to measure each gap and then find the right boards to fill them. Some of the pieces had to be cut in strange ways and I was not always very successful at getting the perfect fit. (Thank God for wood putty....see why I want to buy it by the gallon?)

For example, here is a section where someone in their infinite wisdom cut part of the wood floor out so that they could build a wall to block the hallway. As you can see, each piece was a bit, well, unique. And of course I had to do some repairs around the chimney to fix the gap left after we removed the plaster and exposed the cream city brick.

But I was able to somewhat successfully repair it so that it now looks like this. Not too bad, if I have may say so and pat myself on the back. (And of course you see that really wide crack....more putty needed).

There was also the area where the original staircase had been built and later reconfigured. This was a cheap board covered with black adhesive - the same black adhesive that we removed from the entirety of the kitchen and back entrance floor. You can see a bit of it on the edges around the repair. I am assuming that the sander will make short work of that little bit. I also forgot to take the before picture, but here is an after.

I am hoping that once the cracks are filled (yep, more wood putty) and the entire floor is sanded, stained, and sealed, it will look almost seamless. You will most likely be able to see that there was a repair, but hopefully it will add character and not be quite as obvious as it is at the moment.

And the rest of the work has begun on the side hallway. I admit, it is terribly difficult to stay motivated. And I am finding that my wrists hurt a lot after about an hour worth of work. So, I have been working in one hour increments with an hour off in between. This means it takes longer, but the space is really just too small for two people to work on it at the same time.

I have one of the walls almost completely sanded and the long baseboard piece stripped of paint and lightly sanded. Because it is such a small area, I have found that I have to clean up after every hour of work because the dust just has nowhere to go but down on the floor, making it very slippery. The trim here is also harder to clean up than the trim in the living room. For some reason, the original baseboard was first varnished. Then at a later date it was painted to look like wood. Whoever did the painting did a good job because that paint will not scrape off - it has to be heated and then scraped. Finally, the painted wood look was painted yet again with white paint. Whoever did the white paint was clueless though, because that paint chips and peels right off.

I am still in the process of heating and scraping the paint off of the window. The outer part has been done, but now I am working with three different pieces of wood, some of which is curved, on the inside. Talk about tedious! The living room has provided plenty of practice so I just take it a little bit at a time. I already know that it will take me about six hours total just to finish the window. By then, the rest of the room should be ready to reassemble.

Spring is Here....Time to Get Working

Spring is finally here! After getting a final dumping of 33" inches of snow, warmer temperatures have finally arrived, which means it is time to get working once again. As I looked at my last post, I was surprised to see that I have not posted since 2016! I am so sorry! While we did not do a whole lot of work on the house that is able to be shared, we did get quite a few projects done.

First, we installed our picket fence in the front yard.

Unfortunately, our yard is anything but level! We had to step down on the sides - one more than the other - to stay within the four foot high city requirements. This year I am planning on painting the fence white.

Our second big investment, and the reason why a lot was not done on the house last year, was a new steel roof on the garage. The old roof was pretty old and in poor condition when we bought the house in 2011. It finally reached the point where the insurance company put a rider on our policy excluding the garage which meant it was definitely time for an upgrade.

Now that you are caught up on what we accomplished last year, let's review the various projects in store for this year (and which I will be much better about sharing as we go along). This is the year that we are going to really start pushing on many of the projects.

This week, we finished the first of many - upgrading the washer and dryer set. My old set was, well, old. The washer had come with the house and was super-sized. While it worked, it had a few quirks about it. The dryer was a housewarming gift from my mother and had been refurbished. The first few years we used it we kept blowing the thermostat on it. We finally determined that we could dry our clothes so long as we set the temperature setting on medium instead of high. That worked great for a few years, but lately, we had to restart the dryer to get the entire load of clothes dry. So my husband decided it was time to spoil me a few weeks before my birthday.

What a difference! I usually spent most of Sunday doing all the laundry for the week when I am busy working at the local elementary school. I was able to do a week's worth of laundry in about four loads total. And each load only took about 40 minutes to wash (opposed to 50) and 45 minutes to dry (opposed to 60 minutes). And it plays the most charming music when it is done! Happy. Happy. Happy.

We have also started working on the downstairs bathroom. This is going to be a very time consuming project, to say the least. It is a fun one, though, with each  member of the family "helping" me while I glue every single piece down individually.

It took us about four hours to do this small section. We have been saving pennies for a while and were going to wait to start this project when we thought we had enough. I got tired of waiting. I mean, we just do not use cash anymore like we used to with the debit cards and credit cards, so we just did not seem to be saving pennies like we used to. I will have to go to the bank and start purchasing rolls of them to keep working. The bathroom floor has been taken down to the subfloor. We are then gluing each penny down using an extra durable and clear epoxy that works with metal. I have decided to glue each penny down, face up, meaning that we see nothing but heads.

This is a pun for my husband who is a veteran of the Navy....as in going to the head. Ha ha ha.

Each member of the family takes a turn handing me the pennies, tail side up, so that I can dab on a little bit of glue and stick the penny in its spot. The average tolerance level for "helping" has been two rows. We have had some debate about cleaning versus not cleaning, tarnished versus not tarnished, etc. However, since I suffer with my OCD, I decided that the best option was to be completely random and to use each and every penny regardless of condition, as is.

So, how many pennies are in this first section? We estimate approximately 1,404 or $14.04. So this project will take a while and we will be sure to keep you posted. As for the other projects, here is the list for this year:

• Trim the exterior windows and doors on the garage. (We finally bought a compound miter saw so we can start doing this type of stuff. Yeah!!!)
• Repair the wood floor between the office and kitchen.
• Sand, stain, and seal the living room wood floor.
• Install board and batten in living room.
• Install built-in bookcases in living room.
• Install baseboard in living room.
• Install crown molding in living room.
• Replace two living room windows.
• Install surround sound speaker system in living room.
• Install insulation in living room ceiling.
• Repair broken lathe and plaster in living room.
• Paint living room.
• Update light fixture in living room.
• CELEBRATE THAT ONE ROOM IN THE HOUSE WILL BE FINISHED!

We are also planning on finishing the new custom kitchen this year. We already purchased the new appliances: (2) 5-burner gas stoves, undercounter dishwasher, apron front farmhouse sink, and french door refrigerator. All the appliances but the refrigerator are in the dining room. Just saving up the funds for the custom kitchen cabinets, which we hope to do this spring/summer.

Stay tuned for more pictures and works-in-progress.