Adios Carpets

We closed on our house the week before Christmas, Zach and I got the flu (or some other wicked virus), then Greg got the flu, then it was Christmas. So we only got 2 work days in before Christmas. We were able to get the locks changed (more on that later) and start on the floors.

If you look at the before pictures you can get a small sense of the shape the carpets were in. Especially the picture of the dining room (the previous owners used it as a den). My other pictures unfortunately weren't at the best angles to show off the carpets. Well, I was excited to finally get those bad boys out of there. I found some how to videos on you-tube and read a couple internet articles so armed with my razor blade, pry bar and a mallet I set out to find those hardwood floors. Greg had to work that day, but I kept him updated with phone calls about the progress roughly every 3 and 1/2 minutes.

I started with bedroom #3:

Having problems seeing the hardwood? Yea, me, too. It was little deflating to do all the work to get the carpet and then the mat up and find asphalt tiles circa 1967. One tile had a big chip out of it so I pulled it up to see if the hardwoods were hiding underneath. Nope. Only subflooring.

Onto the next floor, the master bedroom:

Yea . . . Green carpet matting. This was underneath the layer of floor matting that was installed in 2000, definitely a relic from an earlier decade. This was glued down completely, but when I scraped off a small piece I could tell for sure that there were hardwoods underneath. Half of a score!

Next up, the hallway:


The hallway apparently had the same green matting glued to it at one point but it was scraped somewhere along the line before being covered by carpet again.

After that I called it day.

I picked up again after Christmas, this time with a team!

Allie and I crossed our fingers, said a prayer and yanked up the carpet in bedroom #2 (Zach's room):

Yay! No mats glued down, no linolium tiles, just hardwoods.

And another prayer for the dining room:

Aside from about 4,679 staples in the floor, and several cat urine stains, that floor is looking ok, too.

Here's the aftermath (also waste from the laundry room project):

I couldn't have done it with the team I had! Mom, Chelle, Allie and Evan all came and scraped up the green matting and helped with the last 2 rooms of carpet. They were heroes and got the whole master bedroom scraped in just a couple hours! (see the hardwoods?!)

And Zach made sure we were all on schedule.

The Good Stuff

The last post was pretty wordy, I know. But to make up for it, here are a couple thousand words in pictures. (Please forgive me for the awful shadows . . . I am not even an amateur photographer and I had some settings messed up and didn't realize it until I was looking at them on the computer and the house looked vastly different.)

To start it off, here's the floor plan of our approximately 1400 square foot home (click on it to enlarge it). We love the coziness of the layout!

I used a website called Floor Planner to create the layout. It allows you to create very exact drawings, although I didn't have the patience to take all the measurements, so my drawing is only close to accurate.

This is the front of the house and the front yard. Look back at this post for another angle.

The patio (this shot is from before the previous owners moved out):

The backyard and screened in porch from the driveway.

Screened in porch:

The dining room (we LOVE the exposed brick):


The kitchen:


Hallway out of the kitchen:


The living room:



Bedroom #3:


Bedroom #2 (Zach's room):



The lone bathroom: Unfortunately, I didn't get a picture of the linen closet, it's behind the open bathroom door and it's HUGE!

Master bedroom:

Our Big Project

We did it.

We bought our fixer-upper.

This is something that Greg and I have wanted to do for a while now. Call us HGTV addicts, we got roped into the idea of buying a fixer-upper and putting our own sweat, blood, tears, and (of course) money into it and having something in the end that is really and truly OURS!

It was a dream that we had before we were married and we did look at several possibilities 4 years ago when we did the house hunt the first time but at that time our finances prevented us from acting on any of those. But fast forward 4 years to a vastly different housing market, a budget that passed the newly-wed phase, and a variety of DIY projects we had accomplished in our first house (a 10 year old duplex) and our dream seemed a little more feasible.

I don't even remember how the conversation came up, but one day in the midst of talking about cloth diapers or something random like that, my friend mentioned that there was a house for sale down the street from them and we should buy it. I looked it up on Zillow and instantly found myself arranging our furniture in it.

It was a 1957 all brick ranch sitting on nearly an acre of land. Located in a quiet, safe neighborhood which was ideally located to cut Greg's work commute in half while still keeping us close to our family and church.

And my hopes skyrocketed when Greg actually wanted to call the agent and check it out. (I am the impulsive one and Greg is the strong and steady one that ensures we don't make any large stupid decisions.) If he was open to seeing it, then we were half way to moving already.

To make a long series of events short: we went to see it, put our house on the market that same week, sold our house in two and half months, moved in with Greg's parents, bought our new house, and now we are in the process of doing some much needed renovations before we move in.

Much needed is a little bit of an understatement. The house is over 50 years old and not much updating has been done to it over the years. We quickly identified 3 things that we wanted to accomplish before we moved in:

• The kitchen needed to be updated. The kitchen (11x16) is a good size, but (apparently as was common in the 50's) the laundry machines and water heater were taking up a large part of the valuable wall space. We devised a plan to create a laundry room (see bullet #2) and move those large appliances out. With those gone, we will rearrange the kitchen, install new cabinets and add a dishwasher in order to make the best use of the space we have.
• The screened in porch will now be a laundry room. There was a screened in porch right off the kitchen and while it would have been used, it will be so much more valuable to us as a laundry room/mudroom. By framing it out and adding it to the square footage of the house we now have 120 square feet more of incredibly functional space. Plus it gives us more space in the kitchen.
• Our last big project will be refinishing the floors. When we first visited the house, all but the kitchen, bathroom and living room were carpeted. The carpet was about 10 years old and in definite need of replacing but the hardwood floors in the living room gave us hope. Sure enough, all but one bedroom had hardwoods underneath so we ripped up the carpets and we'll sand and re-stain all the hardwood.

So that's quite a list of projects . . . but we're hopeful, a little bit naive, and full of energy. At least we were. But this little blog will be a way for us to document the changes and for all 5 people who will read this a way to see some Before and Afters and sympathize with our in progress shots and stories!