Hello all,
It's been a while since I've posted anything. To be honest, there haven't been any updates in the house in a while. When the school year started back up, time suddenly became very scarce. Shortly after the beginning of the school year, we found out we were expecting (a human, hopefully). We do have a list of things we want to do in the immediate future. Those tasks include, but are not limited to:
1. New carpet in the living room (projected cost $1200 - we can't/choose not to do this ourselves)
2. The nursery - paint, furniture - projected cost - $60 for paint, not sure about the rest yet.
3. A new water heater - ours is old and on the way out, we'd rather plan for it than be surprised by the bill. Projected cost - $500
4. Master Bathroom - the most costly. Projected cost $4000. We are hoping for a great tax refund this year to fund this project. The bathroom needs everything. We will have to hire a plumber to move stuff around, we'll be demo-ing cabinets and walls and we'll be replacing everything in there. We have talked (briefly, with varying degrees of seriousness) about tearing down the wall that separates the bathroom and walk in closet to make it all the bathroom and then putting in a new closet in another part of the room, but that's going to be exceptionally expensive, and labor intensive. For now we've settled on: New vanity (or possibly vanities) with tops and faucets, new fancy tub, add a shower (yeah, no shower in the master bath. What?), tear out the giant cabinet, add paint and tile and decorative elements.
5. Master Bedroom - Paint, crown molding and new window treatments. Projected cost - $250
6. New floors in the dining room (accomplished! Yay!).
Our dining room had carpet. 15 year old, eaten on, family with pets/kids carpet. When we moved in, we knew we'd be replacing it we just figured we had time and could do it "whenever". Then we discovered that the cats loved the carpet... As a litterbox. The carpet was so stained to start with that we didn't notice immediately, until I was walking by one day and smelled it. I broke out everything in my carpet cleaning arsenal and tended to the task, but the more I worked the more obvious it became that they had been using a section of the carpeting for quite a while. Suddenly, "whenever" turned into "ASAP". You can't un-smell cat pee.
We like to look at flooring and fantasize about it regularly. Every time we go to the hardware store we wander the aisle and pick up samples; we check out Lumber Liquidators website regularly. We knew we'd be able to do it ourselves, so we really just needed the materials.
On Saturday, we headed to Home Depot for crown molding and paint supplies (project number 5), and were perusing the flooring aisle when we came upon Pergo flooring for $1.29/sq. ft. in a color called Gunstock Oak. Lots of perks here - Pergo makes the most sense as we are both prone to dropping things, have cats, will probably have a dog some day, and are starting a family. This stuff comes with a 30 year warranty against scratches and damage. Perfect. We also knew we wanted a warm, dark color in the dining room to offset the lighter wall color and curtains we'd chosen. Also perfect. As it would happen, I knew the exact dimensions and square footage of the dining room by memory, so I knew just how much flooring we would need.
We grabbed seven boxes of the flooring (20.17 sq. ft. per box, 132 square foot dining room = seven boxes. and a brief review of sixth grade math). We got extra lucky when halfway down I spotted writing on one of the boxes! "This box only 50% off missing two planks" has never sounded so romantic. For those of you keeping track, seven boxes is 141.19 square feet of flooring, we needed 132, two planks was not a big deal to lose out on for $13 dollars.
Our total for the flooring: $169
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| FYI the underlayment is called FloorMuffler, which we thought was hilarious. |
Then the underlayment. After the cat pee fiasco, we both wanted the best underlayment we could find. We wanted it to be waterproof, smell proof, insulating - basically all the bells and whistles a floor underlayment has to offer. Turns out, you can have that for $0.65 a square foot, but it comes in 100 square foot rolls. Two rolls of awesome underlayment - $130.
That's right: $299 for the whole thing.
As soon as we got home we unloaded the car and got started! We are not patient people and the carpet HAD to go.
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| Floor tools. Spacers are important so that the floor has room to expand without buckling. |
I took all of the pictures, but I promise I helped a little, poor John did not do the whole thing himself (just most of it).
We had to rip up the old carpet.
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| Pulling up the carpet |
We locked Gilbert out at this point since the carpet tacks were sharp. I found this out myself two seconds after the carpet was removed. Thankfully, I had an encounter with a rabid animal earlier this year and am up to date on my tetanus booster. My life is great.
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| Gilbert says "Halp! I don't want to be out here!" |
The other cats were terrified of the loud sounds like you would expect cats to be, and they hid out upstairs away from the construction. It was a long and horrible weekend for them.
After we got up the carpet and the carpet pad, we came to the gross conclusion that no matter how much vacuuming I did, I would never get the carpets clean. Literal PILES of dirt and dust!
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| Eww... Check out all the dirt and dust! |
We vacuumed like crazy, sanded where needed, and then painted the subfloor with something called Killz.
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| Sanding and Vacuuming. We love the Shop-Vac! |
Killz is a latex paint and primer that is meant to cover up smells and I think helps waterproof, but I'm not sure. At the very least, it would reduce the amount of liquid/smells that could pass through the new flooring.
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| Kill it. Kill it with Killz. John's favorite paint job! No fuss and gravity is there to help! |
Then we laid out the underlayment and taped it to the floor.
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| Lay the underlayment perpendicular to the direction the planks will go. |
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| Look how fancy. FloorMuffler! |
Then we started assembling and putting in the floor! It's a click lock system meaning that all of the pieces snap together (in theory) and the floor "floats" (is not nailed down or adhered to the subflooring in anyway). The planks are 4 feet long, and our dining room is just short of 12 feet long. Each row required the cutting of at least one piece, although we would have had to cut anyways to offset the planks enough (8-12 inches). This was the longest part of the task, although even this wasn't that challenging. The hardest thing to do was measure and cut the boards the right way so that there was always a tongue to lock into a groove (snicker).
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| Adding the planks. |
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| Measuring to make the cut. |
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| Meanwhile, Gilbert had a better idea. |
We got about halfway finished with the floor by 10:00 that night and called it a night. We cleaned up the worst of everything and went to bed.
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| Calling it a night. Lots of progress for 5 hours of work! |
Both of us were up very early Sunday morning thanks to my new inability to stay asleep or be comfortable in a bed/anywhere (another joy of pregnancy), so we had breakfast and got started. Plus, we wanted to be finished by the time the Puppy Bowl came on at 3, and I had food to make and we'd have to get it all cleaned up before our friends showed up at 2:30. The clock started at 7am.
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| Finishing Touches... |
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| The last little strip along the edge, then the baseboards and we are done! |
Upon opening box 6, we discovered that the flooring inside, while labelled Gunstock Oak" most certainly was not... It was several shades lighter than all of the other boxes and had a totally different grain! We also discovered that the baseboards near the cat pee area needed to be replaced, so it was back off to the hardware store.
Flash forward an hour and $100 later and we were back home and ready to finish up. I left John to it while I went to the store for Puppy/Super Bowl food and groceries (and Starbucks, we both needed it) and returned in an hour to find the floor nearly complete!
From there John put in the transitional pieces to connect to the living room and the kitchen, added the trim, and we finished and had the living room cleaned up just as our friends pulled in the driveway.
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| The finished product! |
Side note: I am very thankful to have crockpots that will cook while I do other things. It's probably the closest thing I will ever have to a personal chef.
Today I went on a cleaning rampage and am finally able to enjoy the new floors!
And because I love a good before and after...
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| Ta-Da! |
