Hardwood Mix Party! Part One

We have some hardwoods! Woo hoo!  

I know flooring isn't the most exciting topic ever, but if you've ever wondered about laying hardwoods/refinishing hardwoods/had-a-weird-floor-fetish-and-just-like-reading-about-hardwoods, these next posts will be for you!

If you've been following along, you know that 2 of the back rooms in our house had to have new floor joists and sub-floors installed.

Beauty parlor/Master bedroom while there were no floors. We like the sunken in look around here.

In the room that used to be the beauty parlor, there was icky linoleum down so we knew we already had to take that up. In the opposite room, however, there already were hardwoods down that were begging to be sanded and refinished into their former glory. Instead they, also, had to be ripped up.  Our contractor saved as much as he could (i.e. didn't split the wood into a bunch of pieces tearing it up), but we were left with this pile:

Our pile of hardwood complete with finishing nails

If you think reclaimed lumber is a really neat idea but balk at the price, here is some insight. While most of the flooring was salvageable, it was going to take some work to be usable.  So with some help from our dads and Poppy (Joe's grandpa), Joe set to work prying each nail out of the wood.  200ish boards later, we were done!  It was a very tedious process, and took probably 5 hours total. And this was JUST to get nails out of the old wood. Reclaimed lumber is definitely worth a few extra bucks.  While prying the nails out, we had more than 1 person suggest purchasing new wood to save ourselves the trouble, but we're stubborn. And also spendthrifts. So we pried away.

Now comes the fun part:  Putting it all back! 

Laying hardwoods is sort of like Tetris with more rules. Each end can be no more than 6 inches from another end.  It actually looks kind of cool all back in, in a rustic sort of way.  This is just a rough set up because we will have to go back and nail each row down.  

While that was going on in the bedroom, we were also having fun (heh) doing puzzles in the kitchen.  We decided to take out all the walls surrounding the kitchen.  So instead of a separate kitchen, living room, and bedroom we now have a large L-shaped space to use as kitchen/dining/living area.  We had existing hardwoods in the bedroom and living room already, but not in the kitchen, which is right in the middle of the "L".  Also when walls are removed, you have to fix the area where the wall was since it's just sub-flooring underneath.  Here's an incredibly blurry cell phone picture that shows the transition before we started on the floors.

 This picture is taken from the living room area. Kitchen is to the left and the now open bedroom is on the top right. There were a few defunct floor vents as well as the opening where the furnace used to be. all of that had to be included in the hardwood piecing.  So we set to work.  Piecing in new hardwoods is quite the tedious process because you can't just start where the old line separating the rooms is.  You want it to look natural, so you have to take some of the existing hardwoods out so that it will be cohesive. 

When the floors are sanded, it should all look like the light colored hardwood on the bottom and we will be able to stain it all the same color so that you could never tell they were different. I'm excited to see if we can pull it off!  60+ year old wood and brand new wood looking the same will be a fun challenge. 

Our bedroom/beauty parlor is almost done as well!  We've had to do everything in pieces here and there because we are trying to only rent the nail gun so many days at a time (ahem, like I said, spendthrifts).  Once everything is laid down, we can get to work refinishing it all. Those are our big Thanksgiving plans (while hopefully eating delicious food in between).  We have a huge delivery coming from Ikea on the 4th of Dec so we have until then to get these floors done and settled so that things can be put on top of them. No pressure....

Also here's a sneak peak of a beautiful maple slab that I have big plans for.. excited to get to work on that project soon!

I've never worked with wood before other than cutting a piece here and there that Joe needs for his projects, but I am taking control of this one, and feel confident (and a little scared) that it will turn out okay.  Can't wait to share!

Stick around!  

That point in the process where you just want to quit

There was about a month in our home renovation journey when I couldn't step foot in the house without feeling panic, nausea, and wanting to say Screw it.

The thing is, I know that it happens to every homeowner undergoing an extensive remodel. I've watched tons of episodes of HGTV shows, and if you watch closely, every homeowner goes through this range of emotions similar to the grieving process.
Denial "There's no way that floor needs to be ripped out. I stepped on it yesterday and it was FINE.  It may have been a little bouncy, but it was STILL HERE."
Anger  "What the *$@* do you mean it's going to cost THAT much to fix this basic issue?! Don't you understand the budget??!!
Bargaining "Look, we can live with no HVAC/one bathroom/a George Foreman grill as a stove for a long time and be just fine. No need to spend any more money, please?"
Depression  "This house will never, ever be done. I will go crawl under a blanket for awhile now, thanks."
Acceptance "We are going to be over budget and our house looks like a disaster zone. It will be okay.  It is what it is."

To add to our extremely tight budget, we knew that the city would probably make us rewire the house since it desperately needed an upgrade.  We found a cheap electrician by word of mouth and hired him. Joe was focused on the outside of the house and dealing with the water issues (GWMP) and our contractor was discovering the issues inside and removing floors.  Meanwhile, the electrician we hired was busy rewiring in possibly the messiest way known to man.

Here's 25 second clip showing how our home looked:

This is the house at it's very worst. 

THIS is the part where you see people on TV want to give up.  You lose sight of the vision for a bit because how could something this terrible ever be beautiful and homey and comfortable?  I don't know about you, but I still feel a tightness in my chest when I see that video. That is the way my HOME looked for about a month.  We knew that it was going to be a bit of extra clean up work for us hiring a cheaper electrician, but didn't expect that. Our contractor let us know that this was not normal, the mess happening during rewiring, so Joe talked to the electrician about respecting property a little bit more.  In the video you can also see a pile of junk in what will be Emmy's room from tearing out the floors (which my awesome contractor cleaned up really quickly) as well as our hall bathroom with it's brand new flooring joists (oh, did I mention that floor was rotted as well!?).  There's a secret to not falling apart, wanting to throw in the towel.  And it sounds super cheesy but...

Never lose sight of the vision.

When we first bought the house I went through, deciding which walls had to go, which floors were staying, what the bathroom would eventually look like once I tore all the terrible brown tiles out...and I was excited. You  simply can't lose sight of that, because it's going to get really, really ugly in the middle.  When I saw my house in that condition and wanted to quit, I had to choose to see the good. Like, look at how open the front room looks at the end of the video. We decided to open up the kitchen wall into one of the bedrooms and make it a large kitchen/dining area.  It looks so much bigger!  Also, right after that video was taken, my dad went through and cut all of the ragged drywall holes into neat little rectangles that will eventually be patched after our plumbing and electrical inspections. Just doing that made everything seem so much neater.  I clung to Pinterest, and it's wonderful array of before and after pictures that show how things can be made beautiful out of the mess. (Still talking about the house here, although this experience certainly has been edifying).

Very soon, I hope to share some GOOD photos with you guys. Photos that show things being made new again.  I'm so excited for that!  Stick around!

Fixer Upper Woes

I want to begin by saying that it IS normal for you to run into issues when you buy an old house. When walls (or floors) are opened up that haven't been in 60 years, you find things.

Sometimes icky things. 

With that being said, a good, thorough home inspector is your friend.  We used one recommended by the Realtor since our preferred one wasn't available. DO NOT DO THAT!!  Learn from us!  When the Realtor and home inspector are buddies, the home inspector sometimes wants to help the Realtor out by getting the house sold.  While a lot of the issues with our home were brought up by the home inspector, he downplayed all of them, giving us confidence that it was something we could handle.

We were a WEE bit overwhelmed when we learned the truth.

Everyone who is renovating/remodeling a home hopes that the issues will be mostly aesthetics.  Paint, floors, new hardware, freshen up the kitchen and bathroom.  We were hoping that too!  But we quickly learned that our home had water issues.  When I say water issues, I mean the crawl space flooded every single time it rained a little bit.  When that happens, the integrity of the wood in the crawl space starts to disintegrate.  We didn't realize when we purchased the house that the 2 back bedrooms floors were a bit...bouncy.  Since it was a structural issue, we hired a contractor to repair the sill under the house (basically the frame that holds the house up around the exterior walls).  When he went under there he said most of the floor joists were rotted and he would try and salvage what he could.  This is what we ended up with:  

Our entire bedroom floor had to be removed, as well as the floor in the opposite bedroom.  They were too rotted underneath to be saved.  

You can see here the French Drain that Joe started to dig just inside the walls of the house. There was a sump pump under the house when we moved in, but water wasn't able to get to it because of the weird levels of dirt so Joe decided to give it a pathway to travel so that it could make it to the pump, digging by hand a trench all the way around.  He's a rock star.  It was a grueling job, and one that took about a month off the renovation timeline.  

We also dug one on the outside of the house, some by hand and some using a massive excavator. 

Woo hoo, big power equipment! 

A French Drain is basically an underground pipe that carries water away from places you do not want it.  There are a few different methods, and I never thought that I would know as much as I do now about yard drainage.  We also dug 2 dry wells with the help of our excavator rental and installed an exterior sump pump.  A dry well is a large hole filled with gravel or a canister that collects water and then allows it to seep back into the earth slowly.  Side note, so glad we did the dry wells when we did because we got 17 inches of rain right after we dug the initial pits. Because we had huge holes in our yard to collect water, it saved the crawlspace of our house from getting it!  Here is what one of the pits looked like after the rainfall: 

 Slam full of rain water. The trench you see leading to it is part of the exterior French Drain.  We are so thankful we got this done before the rain hit! The picture above is not the finished product. We filled the hole with gravel and landscape fabric and then dirt goes back on top.  I don't have a picture of the finished product yet, because it looks like a patchy mess but we plan on putting sod or grass seed on top to cover the telltale dirt trail.  

So the water issues were a little bit of a costly blow, but we are happy to have it done and are now working happily on the interior of the home.  Moral of the story, get a home inspector that will not downplay things.  You want someone who is going to tell you EVERY SINGLE THING wrong with the home and ideally spend about 4+ hours checking out your home.   

Next time, I hope to share some pictures of the goings-on inside our house! I'm so excited to share the progress so stick around!  

Well, hello there!

Hello and welcome to our humble little blog!

By way of introduction, I am Ashley.  Mom of 3 (almost 4) and wife to my handyman extraordinaire, Joe.  I decided to start documenting our adventures in remodeling our second home and share the journey with you guys.

A little backstory: we bought our first home soon after the birth of our 2nd child and flipped it.  When I say "flipped" I mean "did a bunch of remodeling and then life got in the way so it didn't get put on the market for 4 years".  But it was a great experience and we learned a lot so we decided we wanted to continue buying fixer uppers and giving them a little TLC while living in them for a few years.  

Here we are with house number 2!  Here is what it looked like when we purchased it!

Looks like a lovely little duplex, no?  The family that owned it lived in it for over 60 years!  The left side is the original home which was a sweet little 2 bedroom 1 bath ranch.  After they grew in a larger family, they added on the right side, making it a 4 bedroom, 2 1/2 bath. The lady of the house was a beautician and the door to the right is not another unit but the entrance to her beauty parlor along with a tiny half bath.

We didn't take a ton of BEFORE pictures where the home was untouched because we like to dive right in there. But here's a video if you're interested in seeing the tour. Joe is filming and is not much for commentary.  He calls it the house on "Baghdad" Rd because the name is similar and that's how he remembered it after looking at SO many houses trying to find "the one".

As you can see, the house looks to be in pretty good shape. We wanted to open up a wall or 2, especially in the kitchen area and have a more open floor plan.  We also wanted to rip out carpets to reveal the beautiful original hardwoods and remodel the bathrooms.

So far we have started to do everything we set out to do, although it has taken a lot longer than we anticipated because of running into a few issues. But that's typical when you buy a fixer upper, right?!

As it turns out in our case, not quite.

More on that later, along with some pictures of the house in progress!  Come back soon!