You remember the flooring contractor who was supposed to be here almost two weeks ago? Fired.

Round two starts tonight with a new contractor looking at it at 5pm. If this guy can keep his word, which I find half of these guys can’t do, he will be here Thursday to patch the floors if we give him the go ahead.

That is all I have. Just enough for three sentences and not even a single picture.

Hope you all are having a great Monday!

I love the contractor who is doing the majority of the “rebuild” of our home. He is prompt, very kind, and seems to do a good job. Until the job is done, I’m not going to name his company as I don’t want to eat my words two weeks from now when drywall starts falling off my ceiling; knock-on-wood.

As I mention in my last post, our bathroom floor is finally a full floor:

It is hard to imagine looking at it currently that it will all look similar, but I have high hopes that once the old floor is sanded and finished, the two halves will blend pretty well. Will it be perfect? I doubt it. But this is going to be infinitely better looking than the ceramic tiles laid over the original Douglas fir. One of my first fears of going with new fir was that the grain wouldn’t be as tight. Granted the old floor has a few boards that have tighter grain than any of the new ones, the majority of it is very similar to the new floor:

Here is just the new wood:

Here is just the old wood:

From here, he is going to be framing out the vent stack that runs behind the toilet, and then will be throwing the drywall up. This should started, if not complete, by the end of tomorrow.

Do you remember how we had a contractor out to look at our floors and he was totally not on the same page as us? Well, this contractor is pretty darn close to being on the same page. He actually lives a couple blocks away in a 1920s home. He isn’t into the old stuff quite as much, especially when it comes to plaster, but from the sounds of it, he and his wife appreciate the majority of the older home items. He told Casey he even had new wood trim cut to match the original, and has a refinished claw foot tub. He had a few suggestions for finishing the outside of our claw foot tub:

Not only did he have some good suggestions, but today, he actually grabbed the feet for the tub and ran them over to a friend’s shop to have them sandblasted in a booth for us on his way to pick up some more materials. How often do you find contractors that run errands for you?

I’ve got some surprising, breaking news for all of you: contractors are slow. I know, I know, set your jaw back. Who would have thought? After bugging the general contractor, and giving the subcontractor a push, they contracted (yes, that is correct, 3 layers of uber-efficiency here, my friends)  Roger to come out to throw some insulation up as it had been more than two weeks with bare walls in a North Dakota winter.

And here is that attic space to the left… the insulation you see is on the backside of the bedroom’s closet wall:

There is my project room, the ole do-your-business and turn the fan on on your way out room. To both collect our thoughts and put something down on “paper,” here is what we are planning for this particular room:

• Douglas Fir floors are going to be patched and mixed to blend the new material with the old
• Standard 5′ cast iron claw foot bathroom is going to be placed parallel with the bathroom window (just hauled that pig up the stairs Sunday! due to the really nice, original faucet, we will not be adding a shower to this unit as we have a shower in the basement)
• Walls will be painted (we will eventually look into bead board or subway tile, but not right away)
• Still not sure on paint vs not painting the trim
• Two antique wall sconces will be placed where they were originally before being covered up and having a single light
• We will leave our chimney exposed (I cannot for the life of me find the commentor who originally suggested this. I re-read all the comments 3 times and either missed it or imagined it. I apologize if it is the former for not giving credit when credit is due!)
• We are moving the light switch from outside of the room to the left of the chimney
• Walls will be painted a light yellowish color (you’d have to ask Casey for a womanesque description)

Moving onto our kitchen, that also is now insulated:

Both are temporary insulation jobs until the electrician shows up. We demanded the insulation be put up as I doubt the contractor is willing to write a check out for our soon-to-be-outrageous natural gas bill. While I had family (read: slaves/helpers) around this weekend, I yanked out the second window that was in the kitchen. I’ve got back and forth on this a few times. The entire back half of the room was originally a pantry is my guess. It was about four feet wide and spanned the entire width of the kitchen. That area that I suspected was originally a big window? Well, my mother actually thinks that the window that I just took out was originally over there.

When one of the POs converted what I suspect was a pantry into a bathroom, they moved (according to my mother) the window from that location to the next location to make room for the stand up shower. Well, we’ve decided to not have any window on that wall in order to give us much more options when it comes to laying out the kitchen cabinets. I was torn about not putting one back in, but in the end I decided that I’d take a nice layout over a window that looks into the neighbor’s kitchen.

Also, as you can see, we took out the old “bathroom” door that was in that corner that made cabinet configurations impossible. Not to mention a bedroom with two entrances:

Lastly, we finally got some dollar amounts for a replacement refrigerator and stove. We first ran to Lowes and didn’t much luck. Off to Sears (which was my first, out of high school job). There we found a floor model fridge that was being clearance’d off. A Kenmore Elite model that was originally almost $2000, down to $1100. It was definitely on the top end of what we wanted to spend (essentially the entire insurance money was spent on just the fridge). For the stove, we went a bit lower end and picked up a gas model that had to be ordered. So for now, the doors for the fridge:

[apologies for the white out, the sun is shining away and the picture wasn't reviewed until later (ie: now)]

We had a heck of a time getting the fridge into the house. The doors to our porch up front had to be taken off, as well as the doors on the fridge. In the process of first trying to get it through, we put a nice sized scratch on our brand new door:

(Thanks Casey for taking the picture for me ). You can see the scratch in the reflection, right where the camera is at. That vertical white line, about an inch long that is down to the metal. Any suggestions on fixing that?

Things have slowed down a bit with the contractors recently. It has been almost a week since we’ve had anyone actually doing anything to our house. However, we have had a couple stop out to get information on how to proceed with a few things.

First, one of the supposed flooring “experts” in town stopped by to check out the flooring damage. He is supposedly the best in the town according to our general contractor. While I wasn’t here to talk to him, Casey followed him around as he looked things over. In our living room, where both the tongue and groove sides of the flooring bowed out due to the moisture, and the flooring buckled in a couple areas, he claimed that it all had to come out. Same with the office on the main floor. He suggested replacing the maple (some of it is birds-eye) with oak because it is stronger and cheaper (price doesn’t matter when insurance is going to cover it, by the way flooring guy as long as it isn’t more expensive than what is in here). Then he looked at the steps going upstairs. He claimed that they were not sandable (which I have a hard time believing since they are a single board per step) and should be replaced.

Next, he looked at the upstairs which is all douglas fir, including the bathroom floor I spent hours and hours stripping of linoleum:

He said it all should come out as douglas fir isn’t a very hard wood.

First off, I put too much work into that floor to yank it out. It doesn’t look pretty in the pictures, but I’m certain it will sand out extremely nicely. Secondly, I don’t care if it isn’t as hard of a wood as, say, oak. Two reasons: one is that it is in pretty darn condition being that it is 80 years old, and the second is that I consider a ding or discoloration here and there “character.” It speaks to you. New flooring just doesn’t do that.

As far as the main floor, erm, floors go, I don’t see why it all has to come out. There are a couple spots that I can imagine the nails have failed and would have to at minimum be pulled up and renailed. Worst case is they’d have to replace the boards in that section. I have a few chunks of maple from when the kitchen/bathroom was turned into one room (granted it has a few layers of linoleum, nothing I haven’t seen before, right?) that could be used to fix these sections.

Granted, maybe he is just trying to give a worst case call for the insurance to make sure we can get what we need fixed without insurance breathing down our necks. However, Casey said he made remarks about how the wood they used for our trim is supposedly garbage. Does he think we are going to go pull the 80 year old trim off the walls and run to Home Depot and grab some crap wood to replace it? Sure… we’ll get right on that on boss.

We have a different contractor who is going to do the bathroom flooring upstairs, and if we are happy with the results there, we will have him do the main floor as well as he seemed confident the majority of the floor could be salvaged and seems a bit more on our side.

Besides flooring, we still have an uninsulated kitchen and bathroom and our temps aren’t supposed to get above zero for the next several days so I really hope they can get in soon to get these walls covered. Our heating bill is going to be outrageous…

All in the life of a homeowner right?