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: