Sand Man

Now, the fun part! Friday morning, Greg drove on over to Lowes, picked up the 200+ lb beast and got to work sanding all of the finish, ancient mastic, and water and, gross, pet stains up off the hardwoods. I joined him around 11 when I was able to pass Zach off to my mom. Vacuuming with Zach is a challenge, I can't imagine him chasing the sander around trying to jump on it for a ride . . . that and all the dust not being a great environment for baby lungs.

This is Greg sanding Zach's room. It took a little over an hour to sand that room (about 120 square feet). We had to stop the machine every 15 minutes or so to check the sand pads and scrape off any melted wood filler from the previous finish, empty the dust catcher or replace the sand pads.

Look at that! All the junk came right up!

Changing out the sanding pads . . . which we had to do every 20-30 min as they would wear down.

My turn . . . much more fun than scooting around on your knees sanding the edges with a palm sander, though I did my fair share of that, too.

It took us a good 9 hours to do the first round of sanding with the 36 grit sand paper. It was certainly slow, but effective.

We took a break for dinner, transferred Zach from one set of grandparents to the other, and ran by Lowe's for a few things (including a work lamp for the living room since there's no overhead lighting in that room) then got back to work around 8. We had the machine for a 24 hour rental and hoped to power through the next 2 rounds of sanding (50 and 80 grit) by morning so we could return the machine by 7am and also start staining the next morning.

Our friend Topher came back by to help with same sanding around the edges for a couple hours, and then it was down to this . . .

Greg passing over the living room with some of the finer grits. This was the hardest part because you couldn't see the change, you could certainly feel it, but it was difficult to track your progress moving around the room.

I knew it was getting late but I told Greg not to tell me what time it was. I kept trying to convince myself it was only about 10 . . . together we went through half a case of Mountain Dew, more soda in one night than in the past year!

We finally finished up at 4. Yea, 4. We cleaned up, powered everything off, loaded the sander in the car and went home to sleep for an hour or so. We got all the sanding done before the return time though, success!

And when we made it back to the house the next morning we saw this:

Aren't they beautiful? Don't they look brand new? Super success!

Next up: Dark Walnut Stain.

Fixing the Hole

The Floors were a major, major project.  One that we knew would be a big, time consuming deal; we just didn't know how time consuming. As one friend put it,  it is not for the faint of heart.

 After ripping up the carpet and pulling up roughly a bazillion staples, we were ready to start the real work.  We set a date for the rental of the sanding machine from Lowes, Greg took off Friday from work to give us a full weekend, and we stockpiled all the supplies we could foresee needing.

Unfortunately, one thing we forgot about until the night before we started was this gaping hole in the corner of the dining room.  It was an old vent from when the house used oil heat (thankfully the previous owner was an HVAC guy and immediately updated the system when they moved in).  Because that room was covered in carpet, the vent had been sealed with a high tech solution of duct tape and paper plates and hidden under the carpeting.  Well, we obviously discovered the vent when the carpet came up, but we piled  several tool boxes over it in a make shift way to stop the draft. (I know, shocking that the paper plates weren't sufficient!)  Out of sight, out of mind until sometime Wednesday or Thursday.  

The vent, it's actual size was about 8x8, quite large.

After riping up some surrounding flooring to get to the hole better.

After Greg patched the subfloor and pulled up more hardwoods to give us a more realistic area to relay flooring.

The new floors, a lot like putting a puzzle together. 

And this is a "ramp" that Greg and our neighbor/friend Topher worked many hours on.  It's that strip of flooring across the doorway that you can see to the very left of the previous picture.  The dining room is an addition and sits about an inch lower than the kitchen so they engineered this flooring patch to have as seamless a transition between the two rooms as possible.

 So, this is how Greg spent about 10-12 hours over 2 nights to get the floors ready (I helped about 1/2 the hours) . . .  Next up, this big guy:

The Everything Room

Here's an update on the one part that we aren't doing ourselves: the laundry room/mudroom/utility room/overflow kitchen storage. Pretty much homemaker central.

Because this is an integral part to us moving in (we have to finish this room in order to move the appliances out of the kitchen in order to install all the new cabinets and a dishwasher) and we're wanting to move in as soon as possible (now's not the time to teach ourselves hard core plumbing and electrical work) we hired a contractor to build it for us. This was part one:

Framing in the screened in porch

Adding a window - Zach, mom will always be able to see you . . .

The outside view. It's a real room!

Part two will be adding the electrical and plumbing! More pictures soon . . .

Lock and Key

Along with pulling up the floors, one of the first projects we undertook was changing out the locks.  The fact that we estimated 1-2 hours to change out 3 handle locks and deadbolts and it took 2 days should have been an indication that we were not being realistic with our move-in timeline . . .

Assuming that this would be a quick, no big deal project, I didn't take many good pictures of the process, sorry!  We had 2 options when we decided to change the locks: we could use the existing handles and dead locks and have them re-keyed or we could go ahead and change them all out to something new.  After weighing the various options we decided to buy new locks and went with the Kwikset Smart Key system.  This system allows us to re-key the locks ourselves anytime we need to.  

After purchasing the new, beautiful locks we pulled the old ones off and realized that instead of cutting standard sized holes, whoever had put them in took some short cuts and only cut the bare minimum hole to jam the locks in.  Enter Greg's drill and chisel.  Many, many hours later, we have door locks that protect our house, look wonderful and are installed correctly!

The boys working

Our new door handle!

The kicker to all the hours spent on this is that Greg and I are hoping to replace the exterior doors sometime later this year (see the picture below to understand why . . . not fans of the 60's slanted windows) and we'll have to go through the whole process all over again . . . at least we'll have experience on our side next time!

We hope to buy new front doors later this year to rid ourselves of the slanted windows and the odd deadbolt location.